Product Reviews

Servers are computers that have been designed specifically to handle network storage, and are an alternative to network attached storage (NAS) devices. Hi-Grade's Home-serv 2000 is a server that runs Microsoft's Windows Home Server (WHS) operating system. We were generally impressed with WHS's ease of use but were disappointed with the poor design of the Home-serv.

The Home-serv 2000 is designed to be managed remotely from another computer on your network using the included WHS Connector software or the Remote Desktop Connection utility in Windows. Unfortunately, we had to connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor directly to the Home-serv to upgrade the drivers for its built-in network card before the other PCs on our network would recognise it. Once this was done, configuring the Home-serv was straightforward thanks to the Connector software's step-by-step instructions. Setting different access rights to different folders for different users was much more straightforward than it has been on many NAS devices we've seen.

The Home-serv comes with two 500GB hard disks for an impressive one terabyte of storage. If that's not enough for your needs, you can add two more hard disks by screwing them into the two hard disk trays and sliding them into the front-mounted expansion bays. Once the Home-serv has rebooted, WHS automatically detects the hard disk and offers to format it for you and add it to the available pool of storage. The server has four more internal hard disk bays, but to use them you'd need to add a Windows Server 2003-compatible

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The downside to this impressive level of expandability is size. The Home-serv is the same size as a standard midi-tower PC, so it can't be easily tucked away in a cupboard as most NAS devices can. Even worse is the noise. It's easily one of the loudest computers we've tested, which is a significant problem for a server that will be running constantly.

We weren't impressed with the Home-serv's performance in our file transfer tests, either. It was very sluggish at copying large files and remarkably slow at transferring small files. Copying any significant amount of data to and from the Home-serv will be frustrating. We suspect that the lack of Gigabit Ethernet support is to blame for this poor performance.

Watching a DVD movie stored on the Home-serv using a network media player was not an enjoyable experience, thanks to jittery video and sound that fell out of sync with the picture.

Windows Home Server's backup feature isn't designed to make a bootable clone of your PC's hard disk as Norton Ghost does, but it's good for backing up your office documents, media collection and other files. Each of the computers on your network will be backed up automatically in the background at a time you choose, and after the first backup it copies only changed files to save time. If you add a new hard disk to one of those computers, the Connector software will automatically detect it and ask if you want to back that up too.

Instead of RAID, WHS uses its own technology to mirror your shared folders automatically on another hard disk. This protects them from the possibility of a hard disk breaking down. It's easier to configure than RAID but it doesn't have any of the other potential benefits such as speed improvements.

Ultimately we were disappointed by Hi-Grade's Home-serv 2000. The Windows Home Server operating system is easy to configure and the removable hard disk trays make adding extra storage straightforward. Unfortunately, the poor file-copying performance, the distracting levels of noise and the large case mean we can't recommend it.