Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo Home Server 1900 review

There's no need for a Home Server to be big - Tranquil's T7-HSA proved that. But the Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo Home Server is decidedly on the large side, and its bulging design does nothing to help matters.

Still, it's tastefully designed, in thick black plastic with a clean aluminium trim and a small logo on the top - or on the side, depending on which way round you fit the sturdy metal legs. The front panel provides network and hard disk activity lights, plus four status LEDs, each corresponding to an internal drive bay, showing whether the disk is healthy, failing or absent.

This, of course, is the advantage of a larger chassis. Windows Home Server can combine multiple drives into a single storage pool, and internal devices are a neat way to achieve this. This model came with two 500GB drives and two empty bays; Fujitsu also offers 2 x 750GB and 1 x 500GB variants.

Fitting extra drives is easy - just loosen two captive thumbscrews and the entire side slides off. Within you'll find hinged mountings and SATA cables already in place. Even with all four bays filled, however, there's a lot of empty space in the case. Presumably this is to reduce cooling demands, and we were pleased with the Scaleo's whisper-quiet operation (quoted at 27dB).

Further storage can be added via four USB ports (two at the front, two at the back) and a dual eSATA interface. Besides these, the Scaleo's only interfaces are power and Ethernet connectors. That's not a problem, of course, as Home Server can be fully administered from a client PC. If you get into serious trouble, you can hold down a button at the back to have the server boot into recovery mode: you can then reimage the OS partition from any client, using the provided CD.

Once installed, the Scaleo works much the same as any other Home Server device, but Fujitsu Siemens has added a few extra components to the Console. The first is the TwonkyMedia UPnP streamer, enabling Home Server to stream music and video to any UPnP media device, rather than just Windows Media Connect-compatible devices.

There's also a system monitor, which provides details of internal temperatures and voltages, along with warnings when these get dangerously out of kilter.

The best add-in is a scheduler for making the Scaleo automatically hibernate and wake up at set times. It's a brilliant idea, ensuring your server's available while you're home while cutting the power when you're out at work. You can wake a hibernating server from any client PC as well, though the wake-up utility sticks an unwelcome extra icon in your system tray.

But even when switched on, the Scaleo drew a mere 46W from the mains - not the lowest we've seen (the Tranquil PC T2-WHS-A3 demanded just 32W), but still considerably lower than the HP MediaSmart EX475's 60W.

There's a lot to like about Fujitsu's take on Home Server: a lot of intelligent thought has clearly gone into the feature-set, and while it's bulky, it is at least quiet, efficient and nicely self-contained. Commercial Home Servers are always expensive, though, and at £400 the Scaleo's likely to find a place only in more affluent homes.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith