Great Statement T-Bone! My Voyage started years before WHS V!. I have worked in the same field for over 20 years and in that field there has always been servers that got retired and I would drag home the best one I could get my hands on and turn them into file servers. I had setup HTTP and FTP file share servers in and out, I had setup a Ventrilo and Teamspeak servers on them for our squad that played Battlefield. I have setup torrent servers, But I was left wanting, I had nothing to do backups of clients or the server and it always seemed cobbled and you know the size of those old servers, scsi drive raided OS'es and then throw in a couple 1 tb drives for storage, trying to get apps that would work on a server OS, trying to get scanners and printers that would work with a server was not fun and sometimes would just not work.
So with google in hand i did some searching and found these very forums and WHS v1, the answer to my prayers. I read and watched and read and checked prices and finally decided the 470 would work for me. I have mostly been a AMD guy and was seeing ram upgrades so I was hooked. Bought two of them as It looked like HP was not selling parts for them. The small size, the pool, headless, was everything I needed to finally get a decent system together and up and running, long term.
Had a great time moving 10-15 years of data over, almost lost it when I did the first three things you shouldn't do: 1) set a hard IP for the server 2) got a new router with MAC addressing so I wouldn't have to set hard IP addresses. 3) did not have a backup of my data Also I had tried to do the upgrade in-place and it failed. Lost the server three times, Thx to Comp1962 I got a usb to sata dock and he helped me save my data. Twice!
Life was great, I lost a power supply, purchased one on ebay and finally broke into the system and replaced the power supply, upgraded the ram and re-pasted the CPU. Set back and enjoyed, clients being backed up, duplication was on, I had found the Free Smart addin (Thank you Matt) life was great!
Watched as the 480 series seemed to have more then it's share of problems and then the 490 arrived. Wow, I needed to upgrade but the price was holding me back, I had just spent the cash on two 470 plus I was buying 2 tb harddrives faster then my wife could keep up with. These were great days, microsoft was working on a DE bug which I never had problems with but was looking forward to the fix.
Then there was talk of whs v1 going away and whs 2011 (Vail) coming, I was not happy, but microsoft does what they want. Then I saw the x-510 and I had a feeling that it was going to be the beginning of the end, I was all in, I bought two of them new and found two more later that may have been new or refurbished on ebay, total of 4 and bought another extra power supply. Sure enough whs 2011 came out, I purchased two copies and I put it on my extra 470 and did not like it at all. The big green box in the taskbar, logging in and out, it was not as smooth and easy as whs v1.
Then the end was in the air, microsoft was bailing on WHS completely and HP was phasing out the home server, the end was close. All my clients were vista or XP and XP was running out of time. Started installing SSD drives in the clients and as I did informed the clients to keep all the data on the server. Backups were small and fast.
I was very not happy with microsoft at this time and everybody on the forums was wondering where we were going. I started upgrading all my clients to win7 and was pretty set on staying with WHS v1 as long as I could, but I knew there would come that time when it would not work any more.
That Is when I decided to build one myself and was looking at win2012E and watching. I ended up buying it and have played with it since, I don't care for the AD part, but I feel like IT will be supported for some years.
So to date, I am still using whs v1 on a x-510 with 2tb red drives and I have a second x-510 that I synctoy to monthly. I use two 2tb reds to do non-pooled backups about every 3-4 months and plan on running whs v1 as long as I can. I keep the DIY turned on and updated every 2-3 months, just in case. I use stablebit Drive pool on it.
Microsoft abandoned us, HP at least kept building the server hardware but we all could tell it was the end of the good old days. I bought two of the VGA cables as I saw the writing on the wall. The form factor was awesome, small low power and easy to use, so I knew I would stick with the hardware for sure. OS ? Some things I know for sure: I will not use the cloud, other then email which has always kind of been in the cloud, even before it was called that. I will not use a NAS that I can not pull any drive in it out and not be able to read and copy that data off of it. I will resist Win10 as long as I can. I may go Chromebook or Mac. I do not look forward to the day I have to switch to my win2012E box, which I have only used in testing and really do not like. I may end up moving to whs 2011 first to get some mileage out of it, but by that time it may be dead as well.
I do not like where Microsoft is headed, I have a windows phone and now they have abandoned it, I have seen the surface about half flop and win 10 is a fail as far as I'm concerned.
I'm old, I have to think about my only child keeping the family data alive and if that means I have to move it to external usb drives, then I will, but Microsoft is wearing thin for me.
My girls bought me a Mac Book Pro for Xmas and I don't hate it, at the rate microsoft is going I believe I will be looking at chrome books or Mac books and external drives if they don't pull out of this power dive called OS/cloud rental. I won't do it! My kido can do Mac, PC, Android and she knows just enough about servers to get her by if needed.
So that is my tale, I will continue to use whs v1 till it won't work anymore, I may try to upgrade the hardware to whs 2011 but have the win2012E setting just in case.
My guess is I will not go any farther with microsoft, External drives are at a size now 8-10 tb where I can store my data on them if needed and I use software to image my clients once a year just in case I lose a drive. But this hardware has a fairly short life span now days anyway.
I have a 5 bay usb external as a last resort!
It was great while it lasted, but it looks like microsoft and HP want to forget about home data storage which is very sad. I would like to thank Alex, Comp1962 and all the rest that have contributed these forums, I believe it is still the best place to find help for the servers and home storage in general. It was a great run while it lasted. Good Luck to all! I will be here as long as Alex keeps it running. I will be interested what direction other have/will go..... I will not be looking at win2016, that I know for sure and I think I would do it the same, with the choices we were given.
_________________ [X510 CPU/RAM/ All 2 TB Red's] [X510 CPU/Sync'ed Backup/All 2 TB Hitachi's] [X510 /2 in box] [X710 LIAN LI DIY W2016E] Stablebit Drivepool [EX-503 LIAN LI 5-bay USB3 External] Fear the Cloud
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