So it looks like its been an interesting ride for WHS:

WHS v1 - WHS 2011 - WS 2012 Essentials - WS 2012 Essentials R2

is this the end of the line or does WS 2016 hold any hope for us Hobbyists?

Have any of you moved on from WHS v1 an if so what are you using now and what are your opinions? Hind sight is 20/20 would you make the same move if you can do it over?

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

Gardian, that was a great read. I agree with multiple points you made on the journey. I too am against Cloud services, for business it could make sense? for the home user Im not sure. when you give up something you own to make payments on what was free I'm not sure that makes sense. Plus with the advent of so much more hacking and identity theft I'm not sure 'they' can protect my data better then i can.

As for windows 2012 i agree the experience sucks compared to WHS v1. I myself only upgraded to be able to utilize 4tb and higher drives.

I'm still running my EX495 with WHS v1, using it for PC backups, storage and streaming. I've recently built a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server for storage and other tasks, and will likely shift that way full once my 495 dies.

Edit: And I plan to keep the site up as long as people find it useful, I appreciate those of you that stick around to help.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

I'm with WHS since the beginning. First I bought a HP 470 running WHS 1 - and this system is still up and running serving the family as server for photos, music and video. When WHS 2011 came out I was considering upgrading, but with the DE issues it was clear not a win. And a system with disks with 'only' 2TB support was not the future. This system is not anymore accessible from outside as not anymore supported with security or other updates. But does still a great job just as file server. Ah, yes, I did as well upgrade the system disk (cloning it following a guide found here felt very 'unsecure' while doing, but it worked).

So I bought in addition a HP 495 (they had promo for half the price) and installed 2012E R2. To have DE working I bought Stablebit Drivepool. This even allowed me to extend my data drive to USB disk enclosure which hosts 4 additional 4TB disks. And then added some RAM as well. I use this machine mainly to backup all the devices (PCs, laptops) ranging form Win7 to Win10 of my family. In addition it hosts my private cloud (using "Seafile") so we can share anything within our family and friends - and mostly with any device incl. Android, iOS,..). And I use TwonkyServer as DNLA server for my home streaming clients as well as serving other the internet (via another free software).

Now 2016E is out. So far I don't see anything which I would miss from 2012E R2 - but maybe I need to dig deeper why to upgrade. Anybody knows of anything which would be nice to have?

HP (now HPE) has introduced new homeservers with the HPE Proliant Microserver Gen8. However pricing was not any home user compatible

So I think this setup will be good for at least the next few years.

What I have read and the screenshots I have seen, nothing new. And I can only guess how much money they will want for it.
I'm stickin with WHS v1
I have the 3 WHS patches saved on the server and I have iso's of all the win 2003 server updates. So microsoft can do whatever they want.
I will go to mac's and chromebooks before I go to win10.
If you try it out, let us know what you think.
Good Luck

_________________
[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

Same here with regards to sticking with WHS V1 as long as it continue to works. My main use is backup with some limited video serving to our TiVo's using pyTivo.

And I really like and have no issues with Windows 10. Works well here even on a much older laptop that was upgraded from XP to WIndows 7 and then to Windows 10.

Scott

Hello, if I may...also have been around a while. I still have an ex485 whs vs1, with no mods except a new power supply. The install was painless thanks to all on this wonderful forum. I have 3 red drives and use it for picture , music and document backups. It had been running a version of LMS feeding a couple of Squeezeboxs. BTW the Squeezebox community is also a wonderful forum.
Last year I upgraded a laptop and a desktop to w10 after all the nagging from MS. My trusty little buddy failed me. Nothing worked, SMART addin failed , no backups. I fiddled for a month and gave up. I'm retired so took a long vacation. I missed my music the most and tried getting the 485 up and running again. Was going to purchase a Chromebook also. Really fed up with the MS solutions. Bought a refurb laptop from Dell instead and kept it at 8.1 pro with the intended purpose to run the LMS.
I had an unused 1tb red HDD and replaced the system drive, sat through the 150 or so updates and backed up the new old Dell. Next tried w10 clients and all is well. I'm listening to music, backups are working, life is good. My little buddy is alive and well.
Not sure if anyone is still reading this..just wanted to thank Alex and everyone else that contributes to this great forum. Many thanks....from the old happy snowshoe living in the woods in God's country.

Awesome to hear!!! Great work. They are awesome little joys. and Alex made an awesome resource here
Take care and Keep warm lololool From Wyoming....

_________________
[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