Novatech have shipped my media! I should have a copy of WHS RTM in my hot little hands by the time I get home tonight…. my USB2.0 PCI card should be here on Thursday….all I need now is the time to install it!!
Bye-bye weekend…..
Excited barely covers it to be perfectly honest 🙂
Following my post yesterday, and my excitement at the availability of the RTM software it was only a matter of time before I was disappointed…… Novatech are now reporting that they are expecting stock on September 14th rather than yesterday 🙁
On the plus side, the wonderful guys at SVP have got stock of their 500Gb PATA drives again (£52.30 + VAT) – so one was duly ordered first thing this morning and is en-route now. I suspect that it should arrive along with its’ SATA siblings tomorrow if all goes according to plan 🙂 This will give me all the storage I need to rebuild my server… Just a USB2 PCI card to come. I’ll have 1 500Gb PATA drive internally, 2 500Gb SATA drives in external caddies attached via USB2.0 (hopefully), and still have 2 USB2.0 & 4 USB1.1 ports free for expansion – loadsa room!!
I’ve managed to source a PCI USB2.0 card in the UK, but it’s also out of stock until ~18th September – so it looks like the big rebuild is gonna have to wait a while 🙁 There’s also the small matter of no guarantee that it’s supported by WHS – it’s got Windows 2003 Server drivers – so I’m hoping that it’ll be OK… otherwise I may be in the market for a new chassis to house all the kit…. more expense I could do without….
In the meantime, I have my CCNA exam a week on Monday – so the study has commenced 🙂 and so far, so good….. subnetting actually seems to be making sense this time around – I’ve “understood” it before – well enough for MCSE at least – but I suspect that a better understanding is required for CCNA 😉
Enough waffle for one day – I’ll post my impressions of the new hardware once it arrives – especially the drive caddies…. I’m hoping they’re better than some of the previous ones I’ve had.
Having been in the beta since it first went public, and absolutely loved the product, to say I was very excited when the announcement was made that Windows Home Server (WHS) had RTM’d would be something of an understatement!!Â
Now that it’s available in the UK for a reasonable price…. I’ve ordered my copy 🙂
Novatech are selling it for £86.95 inc. VAT – considerably less that some other resellers in the UK, which is nice…… 🙂
In addition to this, I’ve ordered up some big (500Gb) SATA disks and USB caddies for them. The disks are lovely and cheap from SVP and they are supplying the caddies as well – USB 2.0 ones that support SATA / IDE / eSATA so I’m future proofed for a while at least….The plan is to rebuild the server “properly” – this will involve wiping all the data and starting again – so there’s some BIG backups to run once it’s complete…. the only downside at the moment is that I only have USB 1.1 on my old server chassis :-( so I’m looking for a supported PCI card with USB2.0 ports now.
I suspect it’ll be a week or so before I have all the bits and I’m ready to start – but I’ll post my first impressions of the finished product once I have it built. I’ll also be posting some stuff on the fun and games I’ve had trying to get a reliable wireless connection for my XBox 360 so I can use it as a Media Centre Extender – 802.11a might be more “reliable” but it’s not easy to find hardware (at least not here in the UK) – that’s all I’ll say for now…..
Technorati Tags: WHS, Windows Home Server, RTM
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Technorati Tags: XBox 360, Media Centre, Extender, 802.11a, wireless