Acer easyStore H340 review

The boxy easyStore H340 is Acer's first home server appliance - but in use it feels like a mature, professional device. Behind the glossy front panel sit four screwless drive bays, three of them hot-swappable (the bottom one is the system drive) and two pre-populated with 1TB Hitachi drives.

There's also a front-facing USB port, and if you plug in a hard disk or flash drive you'll see a button marked "USB backup" light up. Press it and the drive's contents are automatically duplicated into a shared folder on the server. The Acer isn't the only server with a feature like this, but the one-touch approach is appealingly simple.

The software too has a few tricks in addition to the usual Windows Home Server features. Acer preinstalls the LightsOut service, which automatically puts the server to sleep to a user-defined schedule, or when all clients are idle. It will power back on at a time you specify, or can otherwise be remotely woken from any client PC.

It's a smart way to reduce the server's power footprint, and a welcome one, as sitting idle in a two-disk configuration the device draws 37W, falling to 31W if one drive is removed. For comparison, the single-disk Asus TS mini demands just 20W.

Acer also provides a six-month trial of the McAfee Total Protection Service, which automatically scans your data for malware. That's good for peace of mind, perhaps, but when the subscription fees kick in you're looking at around £20 a year to keep the service going - and there's no obvious way to uninstall it.

A final distinction is the system monitoring interface, which lets you monitor CPU temperature and activity, plus disk and RAM usage, with email alerts to warn you when pre-defined thresholds are passed.

The easyStore's case can be opened by simply removing three small screws, but inside you'll find no free DIMM slot and no "secret" ports for data or video. There is, however, a half-height PCI Express x4 slot that could support extra drive controllers, should the device's five USB 2.0 and one eSATA port not satisfy.

If your key concerns are power consumption or size then this may not be the appliance for you: check out the Asus TS mini instead. But if swappable drive bays are your thing it's well worth considering the easyStore H340 as an alternative to the Tranquil SQA-5H, especially since it's rather cheaper.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith