Hi gents,
What a nice read, this thread! I bought 1 of the first WHS v1 EX475s in 2006 (in Belgium for that matter: had it shipped from the USA) with a 500 MB Seagate + a 1 GB Seagate drive and have used it from then and still use it today.
I did the 2 GB memory upgrade at the very beginning, and gradually replaced all drives with 2 TB WD Red EFRX models, since my green drives all went south. My WD Reds are still going strong now after +6 years. At the high of the WHS I had 10 laptops and desktops connected, with backups running every night on all of them. Now that the kids are out the house and the desktop is not online that often anymore, I have 2 Win10 laptops connected and the WHS is running 24/7 since 2006!
A thunderstorm blew out the 1 Gbit NIC somewhere in 2011: I installed a USB gigabit ethernet dongle that ran 2 to 3 years and I was able to lay my hand on a colleague's EX475 in 2014, when my system drive was corrupt, in order to rebuild it. And kept it of course with the onboard NIC.
I have used this forum lots of times to get me out of the sh*t for sure and I am very grateful for that!
The most recent quirk I have encountered is the backup battery being dead, so need to replace that in the next weeks to keep the backups aligned after a power failure and restart.
Just to say my WHS is still alive and kicking and I enjoy every bit of it. In this day and age of cloud computing however, I also have all of my music and photos on OneDrive for that matter, but I appreciate the easiness and peace-of-mind of the WHS.
Kudos to all the contributors in the past!
As the saying goes: I am a happy camper and will continue to use my WHS until it dies...
Rgds
Luc
BTW: I am of course a bit prejudiced as I worked for +28 years for Microsoft, just retired as of February 2021
