Hardware Asus TS Mini Windows Home Server Review

With GBs of video and audio, and more than one PC in many houses, home networking is becoming increasingly common. So common that Microsoft thinks you'll need a dedicated server in your cloakroom - we take a look at the first Asus Windows Home Server to see if it delivers networking Nirvana.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/02/19/asus-ts-mini-windows-home-server-review/1

 

this sucks
but the case looks nice

 

The case does indeed look quite fancy though. Shame about performance. I am surprised you are required to connect via RDP to setup printers though seems like a bit of an oversight.

 

Not sure about you guys, but my WHS shares its local printer just fine - maybe I didn't understand Alan's comment about printer sharing...

 

i was looking forward to this ASUS home server but after reading its a definate no no. WHS looks nice though.
fingers crossed Microsoft will soon give WHS the treatment its given Win7/Win mobile 7/Zune and Xbox + add RAID support then would be a beauty though I'd rather have hardware RAID.

 

Does it come with IIS?

 

Although I've not specifically checked, Google does tell me WHS does come with IIS. This Asus uses a standard install of WHS too.

 

that is piss poor transfer speed in both directions. I would expect write speeds close to 50MB/s or higher to be exceptionable.

 

Woeful transfer speeds, and no RAID, and £400 for the privilege. Probably a good idea for technophobic purchasers, but I doubt anyone on here would want this.

It is way too slow to use as a back up device, and while it will stream OK.... so will most NAS boxes costing much less.

It does look nice though.

 

man.... I built a WHS with three times more storage than this, and much higher performance, for £130 less. From scratch I might add. It helped that I got a WHS license for dirt cheap off a friend with access to the MS employee store at the time.

 

i dont know why asus would use the atom if they have the holly grail of CULV with their UL laptop line

just use the same laptop HW and built it inside that case and you will have a much better performance with almost the same thermal requirements

 

Atom is much, much cheaper.

 

Something is very, very wrong with the benchmarks of this machine.

Either the gigabit ethernet drivers are wacked up and need updated or possibly the chipset drivers are not installed. Perhaps some other problem on the reviewers network is causing this.

Several other vendors WHS machines with similiar specs (the HP MediaSmart LX195 comes to mind) post file transfers that blow this machine out of the water. There is no good reason that this hardware isn't capable of at least 50 plus megabytes in each direction.

What chipset is the onbboard NIC? Realtek?


My own homebuilt WHS box using the Intel 945GCLF2 motherboard (Atom 330) with onboard Realtek gigE NIC is cabable of over 80 megabytes either direction on the network. Most of the time even under hard network transfers the cpu is only hovering in the 25 to 30% utilization range. So it ain't the cpu thats limiting it.



Seriously, if the reviewer still has the machine in his possession, please check and see if updated chipset and/or NIC drivers resolve this. I know you were evaluating its "out of box" experience, but perhaps an additional page detailing a fix for its network slowness (if you find one) can be added.

 

I have a custom WHS install at home and think of WHS as Windows Server 2003 for super cheap. It doesn't come with quite all the goodies that Server 03 comes with, but it'll act like a server just fine. I use mine for backups/media/printer sharing and as my development server on IIS + MSSQL.

Shame about the Asus, it did look rather nice.

On the topic about WHS though, I quite like it, though the backups can be annoying as it take a bit of processing power from the computer being backed up.

The other thing that bothers me is the use of dynamic disks.

There's a neat add-on for WHS though, which supports on-the-fly converting of files to stream to xbpx/ps3, does require a decent CPU/RAM though for it to handle anything above DVD-quality movies..

 

Give it a year and Microsoft should have Home Server V2 ready to go, based on Windows Server 2008...

I'd like to see Bit-Tech review the HP EX 490 that's available in both the UK and US - ignoring the Pentium based EX495 (which isn't available in the UK) HP have the EX490 available for £429 - if we compare like for like in terms of HDD storage then £429 for the 2.2GHz Celeron 900 CPU , added Apple Mac support/iTunes server and HDD bays that are easy to access are to me worth the extra £80 over the £349 of the Asus.

 

For tghis sort of money I would HAVE to build my own system. Atoms and celerons may do a job for the current market but even then we already know they suck for the cost. For very litle extra surely it wou be better to build using a 775 skt and go for the E6500?

 

How is Qnap and Synology hard to config? They just provide TONS more features, for what ASUS WHS Mini is doing, Configuration steps are roughly the same.

 

Good review - poor box. So why don't you build a cheap Linux based alternative? Why don't I? I've got an old Athlon XP 2600+ and motherboard just gathering dust, too many old IDE hard drives and DDR memory, probably an old case... just need a cheap PSU and I'm away...

I know the power consumption and noise will be silly, but if the total build cost is say £60 for the psu, then I could have it on for a full year and still be better off...

Reuse - rebuild - recycle as Bob the Builder would say

 

Nice work as usual. A bit of a dissappointment this box. I'm looking at upgrading my hw and might consider building a "home server" from this old junk.

 

Linux is a pain? If you just want something plug-in-and-play then WHS works.