WinHEC 2007 Day 3: First Glimpses Inside Windows Home Server

by Scott M. Fulton, III

May 17, 2007, 4:15 PM

WinHEC Big White LOS ANGELES - A standing-room only crowd appeared late Thursday morning to see Windows Home Server lead developer Chris Gray answer technical questions on the subject of how the company will make its latest permutation of Windows Server 2003 usable by people who have enough difficulty with their microwaves and universal remotes...and how developers will be expected to help them.

A machine certified to run Windows Home Server is likely to occupy the space of an old Toastmaster appliance, and some early prototype cases actually have the appearance of one. But inside, the machine is expected to support as many as six simultaneous SATA drives, not as a RAID array but as a means for providing home-based video storage of around three terabytes, given the increasing ubiquity of 500 GB hard drives.

A Home Server machine is designed to be headless - an adjective which has garnered many snickers among attendees this week - meaning it doesn't use a monitor, keyboard, or mouse standard. Instead, it outputs to video devices; but as we saw yesterday on the floor of WinHEC, Gigabyte has at least one reference design for AMD's Micro DTX motherboards for home servers that enable VGA output as a standby, or for temporary use during system setup.

One of the principal issues developers are facing now is, how to design software and the operating system in such a way to be able to guide novice users through very difficult procedures, including recovering a damaged drive using, essentially, a "fluffier" form of the SYSPREP utility. Microsoft is currently testing a method whereby users will insert a DVD that contains a recovery procedure, along with an image of the operating system that can be pushed back to a recovered drive.

Though the system's cluster of HDDs aren't considered RAID drives, there will be redundancy involved, as data can be mirrored across logical drive partitions. But as Gray demonstrated, policies can be set up to limit what types of data get mirrored.

For instance, he explained, users have a monetary investment in MP3s, whether they're downloaded or ripped from CDs. Those items are worth preserving, as well as photos captured from digital cameras or flash memory devices.

But recorded videos aren't always worth bothering with. Perhaps the user wants to record a few episodes from an overnight "M*A*S*H" marathon, but they're nothing that deserves permanence - and besides, they could consume terabytes of storage even without redundancy.

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