I liked Windows Home Server. One of the features was it would let you do essentially bare-metal backups of windows PCs. It ran a PXE boot server, so if you have a hard drive failure on your laptop or desktop, you could replace the drive, boot from the network, and do a bare-metal restore of any of the backups you'd made (not necessarily the latest one if you didn't want to). It made that level of backup easy for even non-technical people.
the biggest problem with windows home server is that NO ONE knew they needed it. and if they knew about it they were also likely to know about linux and therefore.... probably just set up a linux server instead. it was one of the greatest consumer products ever created, but like no one knew about it MS didn't market it, MS didn't push it like they should have, and so many more issues with it. more over it's very hard to convince someone that doesn't know about tech how important a home server is, and why they need one. like try convincing your grandmother she needs to invest in a device that stores things and she can't directly interface with and doesn't understand.. that's the hurdle that MS faced.
@@herauthon these mobos are notorious they measure the capacitance of the chasis from diffrent pads on motherboard and its pain in the butt to do that job
@@92kostaAcer started doing this to their ultra-light laptops to ensure they couldn't be "accidentally" started with the cover off so you didn't hurt yourself or damage components by shorting it on a metal table or stray tool. The only reason I have for these little ITX wonders is they wanted to take the "warranty void if opened" measure to heart. You try to mod it? Yeah, now you don't have a working system... At least with their laptops, most that I've seen it was a little momentary switch on the bottom that the plastic of the case kept depressed to signify the chassis is closed.
So many of those old atom processors were crazy slow even when they were new. I'm impressed that you got it to do much of anything. Now I'm looking forward to the upgrade!
@@StephenMatrese If you had a computer that ran one of those old Atom processors I promise you weren't crazy and your computer (like mine at the time) was slow as a sleepy snail
@@lemagreengreen "insanely low power" by Intel standards anyway, the chipset was still burning 15-20 watts so the overall board was using still a lot of power for what this was
the weird thing to me is that even though they were STUPIDLY slow, they could still somehow emulate an Amiga 4000 at full speed... which says terrible things about the Amiga... OK granted the platform had died in 1994 whilst the Atom wasn't released until like 2008?
@@100daysofmeh I have a ASRock z170 Falt1lty gaming itx/ac with 32GB of DDR4 memory, this ITX board is 6SATA and 1 NVME, the i7-6700 could be good enough for modern NAS use.
I miss Windows Home Server. When I was in the military I had a home server that I could use to access my media library at home while I was deployed overseas. It was awesome.
From what I can tell, it may have been a commercial failure. Windows Home Server was based on Windows Server 2003 (≈ Windows XP) if I recall correctly, then there was Windows Home Server 2011 which was based on Windows Server 2008 R2 (≈ Windows 7) instead. From what I can tell on Wikipedia, Windows Server Essentials 2016 (≈ Windows 10 update 1607?) was kind of the last version to have features carried over from Windows Home Server.
Windows Home Server didn't support raid att all, it added all disks as a pool more like jbod, but it still was a interesting OS, I used it from release to eol but had a more powerful system, there was program so you could rip your cds and dvds if you had an optic drive, no need for monitor or keyboard, when you insert a CD, it automatically been riped and data downloaded, all settings done from client, then it just worked
Remember the early WHS ones built like a NAS. Was more or less a striped down Windows Server with apps. Acer's was more or less identical with Lenovo's Idea Centre, same on the inside but Lenovo's Idea Centre at least looked a bit better.
Man I can't wait for the upgrade. For only $60 with a FlexATX psu, drive cages and backplane included that's an absolute STEAL for the case alone! I'd still be curious too if the poor atom CPU would be good for anything like a custom network switch or router with that PCIEx4 slot.
Looking forward to your upgrade video to compare/contrast with my own modded H340. I use it as a test NAS -- trying settings/plugins/containers before deploying to my real NAS so I don't eff up the system I rely on! The upgraded H340 is a great little 4-bay NAS with such a tiny footprint. The bog standard ITX tray and flex PSU mount made it seems like it would be an easy upgrade. Splicing molex/SATA power connectors onto the original backplane connector was simple, too. The real "fun," as I'm sure your discovered, was decoding the proprietary pinouts -- and discovering that the backplane needs an extra +5V line (that I tapped from the new MB's USB headers). Unfortunately, some of the front panel functions are GPIO controlled, so those remain unavailable. Same with the individual drive LEDs unless you use an HBA card (I wish Acer made the LEDs come off the backplane instead of the MB, but they wanted to go all fancy with the bicolored LEDs to also give SMART status instead of just having simple activity LEDs).
Windows Home Server was pretty darn cool for its time, you should try and explore it some day. Not useful at all today though.. My first homeserver was an HP EX475 and that thing ran for years before I replaced it. I still have it, but it runs Ubuntu now and is just for backups.
i got a similar HP server from FB Marketplace a few years ago but after finding out how outdated the hardware was, its just been living lifeless on my shelf. My hope is that there is a way to get a modern motherboard to replace the aging one and put new life into it. maybe HH will show how that can be done with his next video, at least for the Acer.
@@djheartbreak831 The motherboard in the HP is much smaller than this Acer, so I don't think upgrading is realistic. Maybe you can shove a Raspberry Pi in there, but the backplane for the drives plug directly into the motherboard so it would be difficult to make it useful. This Acer seems easier since it's more standard parts.
@@djheartbreak831 Well the HP Mediasmart ex49x servers are physically identical to the HP Datavault x510 except the former rums an AM2 Sempron single/limited option dual core cpu and the Datavault x510 uses LGA775 and has a dual core pentium cpu. The boards are direct swappable and there are plenty of examples of these, especially the AMD/Mediasmart variants on ebay.
Really liked WHS back in the day. You could duplicate important stuff over several drives, it backed up all your PCs locally, and if it died, the hard drives could be read normally on any PC as they were just NTFS formatted. Commercial flop but the people who got it generally liked it. Replaced my homebuilt 11 drive WHS box with a FreeNAS build when WHS lost support. Nowhere near the same level of friendly interface and can't just throw in another hard drive, but considerably faster.
Ironically enough, the Apollo Moon landing's computer was a mere 2.048 MHz with 32k words in RAM pales in comparison to the old NAS CPU. I say ironically because the date this video was released Apollo 11 was orbiting the moon getting ready to depart to the surface.
These ancient Atom processors predating Silvermont(J1900, N3150 etc) are somewhat useful if one is paranoid about CPU backdoors, as they don't even support out of order exceution and speculative execution. Though you would want something like D510 as you get 2x performance from dual core, which seems to finally arrive on H342. The case looks very tempting for modding, though flex atx power supply might be a PITA to manage.
Wow - that takes me back. Try installing TrueNAS on it. Intel CPUs should be well supported, just verify if the Ethernet is using Intel and not Realtek.
This reminded me that I have a NAS from the early 2000's with 2TB worth in IDE hard drives. I am yet to get it working, but this video has given me what I need to see if I can make this massive rackmount NAS work as a NAS again!
Oh, I have one of these. I put in a 4th gen intel into it years ago. Had to splice in a wire off the backplane to one of the orange (3.3v?) lines on the atx connector for the backplane to function.
I think the hunt for a nice compact NAS shell is what almost everyone is after without having to sacrifice drive space and/or gpu support. -can't wait to see the update on how you upgrade it.
I would put an Odroid H4 Plus in that thing: - fanless - low power consumption - has 4 SATA ports and an M.2 slot - supports In-band ECC using a normal SO-DIMM. - can hardware decode 4K UHD video.
Ah how cool - the backplane needs a GND wire jumper to spin up the drives with a standard ITX mainboard (it has a proprietary plug to the original mainboard). I had one of these in 2015 and fitted it with an AMD Kabini based board (ASrock QC5000-ITX) that ran circles around the Atom hardware. It was nice and solid and didn't need a lot of power.
I bought my Acer H340 new at the time. I bought a used mainboard bundle and rebuilt it yesterday. GIGABYTE GA-H67N-USB3 with i5 Intel CPU. It works great.
Fighting single thread problem. Most of what your doing is going to spend a lot of wall clock in task switching and if memory is limited it's swapping on top of it all. Doing something CLI would probably suit it best. Basic linux LVM raid with parity wouldn't be a huge problem if the parity is already done and then start copying files. Best option is to offload the raid to a card and let-r-rip
I considered upgrading the hardware as well, I originally installed OMV (blindly) and of course, found it dreadfully slow But for those of you who have one of these lying around (better yet, the H342 iteration) or can find it cheap online, I have a suggestion for it that is both simple and useful Put the jumper in, leave an empty hard drive in it and boot a USB of the latest Daphile ISO The machine booted without fuss, opening the web interface worked first try and the install can be copied from that initial USB boot and further setup can continue from the single hard drive you put in Make sure said drive is "Clean", no partition or format information so that the Daphile installer will handle it The resulting system can be used to pipe music throughout your home using LMS/Squeezelite devices and has adequate performance to even be a very light file server, for your music files Lots of limitations, but a sound use case for the potato class hardware The fact I have mp3s, flacs and even backups of DVD ISOs on the 4 drives (can add a 5th to the e-sata port too) makes it a fairly low hydro powered server for an audio server
Had one of these new, loved it. WHS was great on it, and the experience was good enough that I wanted to do it again. Got another of these recently, and found the same video you did. Found the jumper and got a video card installed (a slight update on the one he recommended). The original motherboard was apparently pegged at 2GB max for RAM and WHS had the limit of 8TB total. To get Unraid running, I had to disable all booting options except the USB drive, and only a couple of USB drives would work anyways. But have Unraid running the NAS, and two Docker containers with Iventoy and a hard drive file manager. And those aren’t autostart because things seem to get unstable if I run out that way. But now, it’s handling the NAS for a Home Assistant Green box where I have everything else I was hoping to run on the Acer.
Windows Home Server was all the rage back in 2008-2012 or so time-frame. I remember deploying a few for use in Home Theater setups to connect Windows Media Center (Vista) to for DVD access and actually copying the DVDs from the clients collection in raw format to the server. I had built my own WHS to learn with and got really good with it. It was nice for it's time and made Windows Media Center fun. A lot better than using a 200-disk Sony Vaio DVD Jukebox lol.
A better bet might be to see case designers build cases for mini-itx boards so that people can install 4+ drives on using something like the n100 to power it all. The appetite for small form factor home servers / Nas is growing, and case manufacturers are really dropping the ball here.
Never heard of WHS? Too bad, it was a fun time in home networking. The HP EX495 MediaSmart Server would have been a great place to start as it was a classic WHS.
I have something similiar but running an Asrock single corr 1.5ghz with 8gb ram, 2x2tb mirror, but with XigmaNAS since that seemed to work well with singlecore and has been working quite well for like 11 years.
I actually got a hold of a HP MicroServer gen8 (I believe it's called?), also 4bay, with vga output and a full pcie x16 slot (although, pcie 2.0, but still). It was a mess to get to work properly but also got openmediavault on that one and a new drive for it, and it runs as a backup server for my parents :)
i bought one of these a few years ago for 30 dollars, I dumped the Atom Motherboard and shoved in a Ryzen 2700x downclocked as a File and VM server, all running off the original PSU. Solid little case, I might bring it out of storage and put in a super low power Intel Atom N95 motherboard or something when they get cheaper
This was fun. On the one hand - a somewhat predictable outcome given the age and spec of the system. On the other hand - I"ve been in the IT business for a LONG time and *I* had *also* not heard of "Windows Home Server" 😄 For me, one of the great things about *you* doing these kinds of exploration of old hardware means ... I don't have to ... which makes my lovely wife very happy!
As someone who struggled running "modern" things on N36L I can tell you that Unraid didn't want to run just due to hardware being old and "not compatible" in some way. I had the same issue with Proxmox and ESXI (I think it was 5 but can't remember now), but in the end I kinda ditched it into a wardrobe to think more about putting something like rpi5 with pci-e to backplane adapter or something.
I might still have one of these and I just recently acquired some older boards for cheap and might be able to mod the one that I have as well. The only downsides are the drive sleds have rubber isolation on their toolless pegs that degrades very fast, and the LEDs being very non-standard wiring
I buyed two of the Easystores in 2009. Still using them Today for Backups of Important Files. Have 4x2TB Drives inside. Only for Storing Datas its Good enough.
Fun fact: Despite being Hyperthreaded, this generation of Atom CPUs lack Out-of-Order execution. Which is great for package size and power savings, but not for performance. So glad I at least had the 330, which is dual-core. Also, the i945 (?) chipset uses more power than the CPU. Mine has a passive heatsink on the CPU and a fan on the chipset!
Don't worry about "being judged." Just showing 'what ya gotta do' is great to see. Wondering - Don't NAS need much more RAM to help transfer speeds to disk?
looks like fairly common hardware for NAS systems of that age - I still have 3x HP N36l microservers (AMD Athlon II Neo N36L (1.3 Ghz), 1GB NIC, PCI 2.0 expansion slot) in use as NAS boxes and they work extremely well even after 10+ years of use.
Well I can't wait to see if you ran into the same issues I did modifying that thing. New power supply, modified power cable for the back plane. Slightly modified power on back plane(if I recall that was to try and prevent an issue people were talking about online where the back plane wouldn't work with other boards but it's been a hot minute. I just found that there was one point that had a missing voltage and fixed that, not totally sure if it was needed but it's not hurting at least). I still haven't gotten around to making the front panel working. so it's just a different rigged up button for power right now and no indicates(nothing quite as permanent as a temporary fix I guess). Oh and a new fan and an SSD crammed inside the case for the OS. It's stupid tight but it works great.
Those Atoms were probably some of the first versions available, no wonder it was so slow. tbh I figured you were going to go right into swapping out the motherboard but now I see you did that in another video, so I'm going to go watch that next.
don't know if somebody pointed this, but it have a tack swith in the back of the board, near the fan header. Maybe thats a "intrusions detections" and the system only post with the tray in the slot (of with the button pressed). Just a tought
Hy, I was able to buy a identical case! I'm planning to build something based on n100 SOC motherboard. The SATA backplane can be turn on by shorting some wires on the header...I'm sure you figure out already! Wish you the best!!
I'm happy you finally gave OMV a shot! You could have installed it on a USB stick and use all of your bays for storage but I'm not sure how long it would take to boot with those USB 2.0 speeds😅 Yeah, you have to "apply" every change on OMV but on a modern system it only takes a couple of seconds though
I know some old(?) NAS-es uses a small set of mirrors for the root and then RAID-something for the data. You just make a set of partitions for the root, each big enough to hold what's needed and then make a RAID-1 spanning all of them. Then a new partition on each drive for the data. I beleive those I've seen (like QNAP) places the root directly on the RAID-1. I'd rather use LVM in this case to easily separate out the swap. Then the same with the data volume. This will obviously make the rootfs slower than on an ssd, but it'll give you redundancy. I guess you'll have to stick to debian or something instead of openmediavault for this, though.
A Zima board would make a good replacement for that old motherboard. It has the PCI-e slot which you could connect to the backplane with a riser cable. You'd just need to mount it somehow so the ports would be accessible from the back. A 3D printed IO shield perhaps. I'm sure TrueNAS would run on it. Maybe even AuxXxilium Arc Loader for a Synology experience (It's a github project I've been using on older hardware).
I wouldn't give a 1$ for that MB... But the chasis with the sata backplane and stuff is perfect for a really modern nas. I'll be waiting for that video.
I actually have one of these. I had to use a PCIE cable to get a card working as well. I installed a few OS's on it including Windows and CasaOS. I settled on Windows 10 booting off a USB. I was going to give it to my mom to use for her home business, but she ended up not wanting it. So it's just sitting in my garage in a box again.
I have a acer NAS so old, that the filesystem isn't even on Windows. The encryption is on the first gen, and Windows 10 only Supports gen 2 and 3.. It has 4 bays, I got it for free, and I think the hardware broke on me.. It came with 2 180GB drives. Software was by acer, and not upgradebale, it had no USB-Interface, no Displayoutput, just a really old NAS!
I can‘t quiet remember what I did with Unraid to get it working on the stock motherboard but I think you have to use legacy boot and make sure the USB device is ready to use it.
10:30 you can use ZFS on Debian by enabling the backports repository (and a tiny bit of terminal input), I don’t think you would want to use ZFS with this system but you could.
I have an old QNAP TS-451 sitting in pieces on my desk as I’m trying to make something useful out of it. Found it for very cheap on Marketplace like a week ago and thought it might be worth it to try and utilize it as an extra off site backup. I already have my old HP Microserver N40L as an offsite backup but you can’t have enough backups… 😅 I’m first going to try and flash Alpine Linux onto the eUSB DOM that the QNAP OS lived on, but since it’s only 512 MB it needs to be a quite minimal install. Alpine is great since it can run in RAM. With MergerFS and SnapRAID it should be useful enough for backup. If that doesn’t work out I’m plugging in a USB header adapter instead of the DOM and shoehorn in a USB to SATA SSD somewhere. Then I’ll have more options for OS. Either TrueNAS or OMV then. But I really do like Alpine so my suggestion is to try that! You won’t get a UI but it’s simple enough in the CLI. 👍
I have one; it's okish; probably best to use with truenas and iscsi(as a 4 bay iscsi enclosure)...... things to know: 1) it has an onboard header for vga, ps/2,etc(diy proably required or the route i took) 2) as this was first gen x64 atom it's a 230,945GC chipset, this is only sata2!(it's slow) 3) lenovo has a model of the same unit with a diff faceplate 4) I slic2.1 modded mine:P..... 5) the esata controller is trash, I modded mine to be usable for the system drive but it was unstable 6) H1110 HBA is probably a good fit and would bring it up to SATA3 ** will be interested to watch the follow up as I did initially try to upgrade mine but bailed at the first sign of trouble(didn't have enough incentive:P)
Now, as it looks like a standard mobo. A modern board may fit. Chassis's are silly prices these days. A fan replacement or new PSU and you may be golden for a PCIe equipped NAS chassis.
The main-board seems to have a small switch on it's side, which may be a security in case you remove the motherboard from the case and slides it out, holding this should in theory allow you to turn the unit on.
I'd be willing to bet there's a chassis intrusion detect switch on the mb somewhere (maybe even built into the front panel connector harness..?) that you overlooked.
looking forward to the next one! the case seems really nice for doing a diy remote-to-a-friend setup if the psu can be replaced with say a picopsu or something to make it dead quiet
I guess thingys are interesting... but people are giving away Haswell systems that could easily house 4 hard drives. Anyway.. another nicely produced video.
I'm sure that most of the processor resources are spent on the web interface, so that you don't just have text with buttons, but beautiful text with beautiful buttons. In general, installing specialized NAS OS is... well, this is an absolutely correct action, but a little boring. Try bare OpenBSD (or some other BSD), just for fun! Or for suffering, I don’t know. Or maybe FreeDOS, why not?😆
id get it just for the astetic. also my acer aspire R3300 would probably make a better nas, atleast in hardware terms because it cant connect more then one hdd. 4:54 i asume the dent is from shipping since there is no absolutely no bend in that image 6:29 there is probably a button or connector at the back that detect if it in the case
Modify modify modify, waiting for the sequel 😊
I am waiting to see what direction he takes on this one.
Same! Upgrade the ITX board and post sequel!
I liked Windows Home Server. One of the features was it would let you do essentially bare-metal backups of windows PCs. It ran a PXE boot server, so if you have a hard drive failure on your laptop or desktop, you could replace the drive, boot from the network, and do a bare-metal restore of any of the backups you'd made (not necessarily the latest one if you didn't want to). It made that level of backup easy for even non-technical people.
Windows Home Server was an EXCELLENT product. Shame the 2011 edition dumped the JBOD drive pooling, and then Microsoft dumped it entirely.
the biggest problem with windows home server is that NO ONE knew they needed it. and if they knew about it they were also likely to know about linux and therefore.... probably just set up a linux server instead. it was one of the greatest consumer products ever created, but like no one knew about it MS didn't market it, MS didn't push it like they should have, and so many more issues with it. more over it's very hard to convince someone that doesn't know about tech how important a home server is, and why they need one.
like try convincing your grandmother she needs to invest in a device that stores things and she can't directly interface with and doesn't understand.. that's the hurdle that MS faced.
system didnt boot when motherboard out is because of the chasis intrusion built into some prebuilts they do not like to turn on outside the chasis
just fuse the sensor ?
@@herauthon these mobos are notorious they measure the capacitance of the chasis from diffrent pads on motherboard and its pain in the butt to do that job
@@herauthon These boards have it as part of the motherboard unlike consumer motherboards where you plug said sensor into a labeled header.
@@theindianallrounders No way! Why do they go to such lengths, what is the point?
@@92kostaAcer started doing this to their ultra-light laptops to ensure they couldn't be "accidentally" started with the cover off so you didn't hurt yourself or damage components by shorting it on a metal table or stray tool. The only reason I have for these little ITX wonders is they wanted to take the "warranty void if opened" measure to heart. You try to mod it? Yeah, now you don't have a working system... At least with their laptops, most that I've seen it was a little momentary switch on the bottom that the plastic of the case kept depressed to signify the chassis is closed.
So many of those old atom processors were crazy slow even when they were new. I'm impressed that you got it to do much of anything. Now I'm looking forward to the upgrade!
So, I wasn't crazy, my computer was insanely slow (and, maybe, I wasn't nuts for running two).
@@StephenMatrese If you had a computer that ran one of those old Atom processors I promise you weren't crazy and your computer (like mine at the time) was slow as a sleepy snail
Yeah. They were slow even by early 00's standards, just insanely low power.
@@lemagreengreen "insanely low power" by Intel standards anyway, the chipset was still burning 15-20 watts so the overall board was using still a lot of power for what this was
the weird thing to me is that even though they were STUPIDLY slow, they could still somehow emulate an Amiga 4000 at full speed... which says terrible things about the Amiga... OK granted the platform had died in 1994 whilst the Atom wasn't released until like 2008?
I cant wait for the upgrade video
It’s a doozy, that’s for sure haha
yep
N100 ?
@@100daysofmeh the only way :P
@@100daysofmeh I have a ASRock z170 Falt1lty gaming itx/ac with 32GB of DDR4 memory, this ITX board is 6SATA and 1 NVME, the i7-6700 could be good enough for modern NAS use.
I would slap a PCIe to NVME (or M.2 SATA for compatibility) adapter into that slot, and use that as a boot disk to reclaim that 4th drive bay :)
You're unlikely to be able to boot from it though
@@richardnpaul_mob You could only get problems bootin from an nvme but a SATA m.2 could be used to boot like any other drive.
@@richardnpaul_mob You could always stick a boot loader on a USB drive. Clunky, but should work!
Mod the bios to boot from
Nvme
@@cleanycloth yeah I've seen that work
you hit the jackpot with this, generic nas cases are more than that, all you need is a nice little itx board, and some drives, and its go time....
Indeed. sadly with the video out people might now sell it at a higher price. since its now known you can use it as a NAS case
with a LSI SAS Controller to drive .. the drives ?
Oh my god, i have the same designed desktop from that period when we got it in 2009, seeing a nas with that same look is wild!
You could have a matching set!
@@geoffmerritt not a bad idea, just a bit low on the priority list
I miss Windows Home Server. When I was in the military I had a home server that I could use to access my media library at home while I was deployed overseas. It was awesome.
From what I can tell, it may have been a commercial failure.
Windows Home Server was based on Windows Server 2003 (≈ Windows XP) if I recall correctly, then there was Windows Home Server 2011 which was based on Windows Server 2008 R2 (≈ Windows 7) instead.
From what I can tell on Wikipedia, Windows Server Essentials 2016 (≈ Windows 10 update 1607?) was kind of the last version to have features carried over from Windows Home Server.
some old systems don't have a bios screen
I learned the hardway..
I had this NAS back in the day and absolutely loved it.
Windows Home Server didn't support raid att all, it added all disks as a pool more like jbod, but it still was a interesting OS, I used it from release to eol but had a more powerful system, there was program so you could rip your cds and dvds if you had an optic drive, no need for monitor or keyboard, when you insert a CD, it automatically been riped and data downloaded, all settings done from client, then it just worked
Remember the early WHS ones built like a NAS. Was more or less a striped down Windows Server with apps.
Acer's was more or less identical with Lenovo's Idea Centre, same on the inside but Lenovo's Idea Centre at least looked a bit better.
That hostname though.. "asspire" probably describes it best😂
Man I can't wait for the upgrade. For only $60 with a FlexATX psu, drive cages and backplane included that's an absolute STEAL for the case alone! I'd still be curious too if the poor atom CPU would be good for anything like a custom network switch or router with that PCIEx4 slot.
Looking forward to your upgrade video to compare/contrast with my own modded H340. I use it as a test NAS -- trying settings/plugins/containers before deploying to my real NAS so I don't eff up the system I rely on! The upgraded H340 is a great little 4-bay NAS with such a tiny footprint.
The bog standard ITX tray and flex PSU mount made it seems like it would be an easy upgrade. Splicing molex/SATA power connectors onto the original backplane connector was simple, too. The real "fun," as I'm sure your discovered, was decoding the proprietary pinouts -- and discovering that the backplane needs an extra +5V line (that I tapped from the new MB's USB headers).
Unfortunately, some of the front panel functions are GPIO controlled, so those remain unavailable. Same with the individual drive LEDs unless you use an HBA card (I wish Acer made the LEDs come off the backplane instead of the MB, but they wanted to go all fancy with the bicolored LEDs to also give SMART status instead of just having simple activity LEDs).
Oh yeah, good tip! had no idea these existed, they're prime for bringing up to date.
Windows Home Server was pretty darn cool for its time, you should try and explore it some day. Not useful at all today though.. My first homeserver was an HP EX475 and that thing ran for years before I replaced it. I still have it, but it runs Ubuntu now and is just for backups.
i got a similar HP server from FB Marketplace a few years ago but after finding out how outdated the hardware was, its just been living lifeless on my shelf. My hope is that there is a way to get a modern motherboard to replace the aging one and put new life into it.
maybe HH will show how that can be done with his next video, at least for the Acer.
I was just about to buy 2016 until I saw this comment😭
@@djheartbreak831 The motherboard in the HP is much smaller than this Acer, so I don't think upgrading is realistic. Maybe you can shove a Raspberry Pi in there, but the backplane for the drives plug directly into the motherboard so it would be difficult to make it useful. This Acer seems easier since it's more standard parts.
@@djheartbreak831 Well the HP Mediasmart ex49x servers are physically identical to the HP Datavault x510 except the former rums an AM2 Sempron single/limited option dual core cpu and the Datavault x510 uses LGA775 and has a dual core pentium cpu. The boards are direct swappable and there are plenty of examples of these, especially the AMD/Mediasmart variants on ebay.
This NAS is old, but Hardware Haven brings youthful life to his projects!
I used to have one of these, loved that OS.
Really liked WHS back in the day. You could duplicate important stuff over several drives, it backed up all your PCs locally, and if it died, the hard drives could be read normally on any PC as they were just NTFS formatted.
Commercial flop but the people who got it generally liked it. Replaced my homebuilt 11 drive WHS box with a FreeNAS build when WHS lost support.
Nowhere near the same level of friendly interface and can't just throw in another hard drive, but considerably faster.
Ironically enough, the Apollo Moon landing's computer was a mere 2.048 MHz with 32k words in RAM pales in comparison to the old NAS CPU.
I say ironically because the date this video was released Apollo 11 was orbiting the moon getting ready to depart to the surface.
Nah, that case looks like it was damaged in shipping. Not an accidental hide from the seller.
These ancient Atom processors predating Silvermont(J1900, N3150 etc) are somewhat useful if one is paranoid about CPU backdoors, as they don't even support out of order exceution and speculative execution.
Though you would want something like D510 as you get 2x performance from dual core, which seems to finally arrive on H342. The case looks very tempting for modding, though flex atx power supply might be a PITA to manage.
This looks super interesting for maybe swapping in an n100 board. Can't wait for the sequel!
Wow. This channel is growing fast. You're doing something right
I loved my Windows home Server system back in the day. Was easy network storage and PC backups.
Wow - that takes me back. Try installing TrueNAS on it. Intel CPUs should be well supported, just verify if the Ethernet is using Intel and not Realtek.
This reminded me that I have a NAS from the early 2000's with 2TB worth in IDE hard drives. I am yet to get it working, but this video has given me what I need to see if I can make this massive rackmount NAS work as a NAS again!
Oh, I have one of these. I put in a 4th gen intel into it years ago. Had to splice in a wire off the backplane to one of the orange (3.3v?) lines on the atx connector for the backplane to function.
I think the hunt for a nice compact NAS shell is what almost everyone is after without having to sacrifice drive space and/or gpu support. -can't wait to see the update on how you upgrade it.
I didn't realize Acer made an Aspire NAS.
HP also made one, which they called MediaSmart Server.
@@kbhasi Hmm, intresting
I would love to see a 'How Fast Can I Make This NAS' video even if it means everything is new apart from the chassis
I would put an Odroid H4 Plus in that thing:
- fanless
- low power consumption
- has 4 SATA ports and an M.2 slot
- supports In-band ECC using a normal SO-DIMM.
- can hardware decode 4K UHD video.
Ah how cool - the backplane needs a GND wire jumper to spin up the drives with a standard ITX mainboard (it has a proprietary plug to the original mainboard).
I had one of these in 2015 and fitted it with an AMD Kabini based board (ASrock QC5000-ITX) that ran circles around the Atom hardware. It was nice and solid and didn't need a lot of power.
This NAS is 100% more usable than any storage servers that were running crowd strike today
Seriously, windows home server was actually pretty cool....
I bought my Acer H340 new at the time. I bought a used mainboard bundle and rebuilt it yesterday.
GIGABYTE GA-H67N-USB3 with i5 Intel CPU. It works great.
I only recently pensioned off the older sibling of this the Acer Altos EasyStore from 2007, it was a great NAS for it's age.
Acer even sold servers with hot swappable drives. At a site i work they had one from 2003.
Fighting single thread problem. Most of what your doing is going to spend a lot of wall clock in task switching and if memory is limited it's swapping on top of it all. Doing something CLI would probably suit it best. Basic linux LVM raid with parity wouldn't be a huge problem if the parity is already done and then start copying files. Best option is to offload the raid to a card and let-r-rip
I considered upgrading the hardware as well, I originally installed OMV (blindly) and of course, found it dreadfully slow
But for those of you who have one of these lying around (better yet, the H342 iteration) or can find it cheap online, I have a suggestion for it that is both simple and useful
Put the jumper in, leave an empty hard drive in it and boot a USB of the latest Daphile ISO
The machine booted without fuss, opening the web interface worked first try and the install can be copied from that initial USB boot and further setup can continue from the single hard drive you put in
Make sure said drive is "Clean", no partition or format information so that the Daphile installer will handle it
The resulting system can be used to pipe music throughout your home using LMS/Squeezelite devices and has adequate performance to even be a very light file server, for your music files
Lots of limitations, but a sound use case for the potato class hardware
The fact I have mp3s, flacs and even backups of DVD ISOs on the 4 drives (can add a 5th to the e-sata port too) makes it a fairly low hydro powered server for an audio server
It's great to use hardware as long as it is feasible to avoid e-waste, but with this power consumption and performance, retirement seems reasonable.
Treat yourself to an icydock and never worry about 2.5 drive support again.
I still use a RPi 1 as a ssh gateway to my home network. There’s always a use for old hardware.
The chassis is very good, i would just change everything, with a fanless N100 and a 3D print front.
When you look at the price of small compact cases with more than 2 drive bays, it's very tempting to get one of those.
Had one of these new, loved it. WHS was great on it, and the experience was good enough that I wanted to do it again. Got another of these recently, and found the same video you did. Found the jumper and got a video card installed (a slight update on the one he recommended). The original motherboard was apparently pegged at 2GB max for RAM and WHS had the limit of 8TB total. To get Unraid running, I had to disable all booting options except the USB drive, and only a couple of USB drives would work anyways. But have Unraid running the NAS, and two Docker containers with Iventoy and a hard drive file manager. And those aren’t autostart because things seem to get unstable if I run out that way. But now, it’s handling the NAS for a Home Assistant Green box where I have everything else I was hoping to run on the Acer.
Windows home server used drive expander, similar to unraid, it combined drives regardless of capacity...
Windows Home Server was all the rage back in 2008-2012 or so time-frame. I remember deploying a few for use in Home Theater setups to connect Windows Media Center (Vista) to for DVD access and actually copying the DVDs from the clients collection in raw format to the server. I had built my own WHS to learn with and got really good with it. It was nice for it's time and made Windows Media Center fun. A lot better than using a 200-disk Sony Vaio DVD Jukebox lol.
A better bet might be to see case designers build cases for mini-itx boards so that people can install 4+ drives on using something like the n100 to power it all.
The appetite for small form factor home servers / Nas is growing, and case manufacturers are really dropping the ball here.
Never heard of WHS? Too bad, it was a fun time in home networking. The HP EX495 MediaSmart Server would have been a great place to start as it was a classic WHS.
I have something similiar but running an Asrock single corr 1.5ghz with 8gb ram, 2x2tb mirror, but with XigmaNAS since that seemed to work well with singlecore and has been working quite well for like 11 years.
I actually got a hold of a HP MicroServer gen8 (I believe it's called?), also 4bay, with vga output and a full pcie x16 slot (although, pcie 2.0, but still). It was a mess to get to work properly but also got openmediavault on that one and a new drive for it, and it runs as a backup server for my parents :)
Oh man... I had this exact same NAS back in the days. Quite glad I don't have it anymore. 😂
i bought one of these a few years ago for 30 dollars, I dumped the Atom Motherboard and shoved in a Ryzen 2700x downclocked as a File and VM server, all running off the original PSU. Solid little case, I might bring it out of storage and put in a super low power Intel Atom N95 motherboard or something when they get cheaper
This was fun. On the one hand - a somewhat predictable outcome given the age and spec of the system. On the other hand - I"ve been in the IT business for a LONG time and *I* had *also* not heard of "Windows Home Server" 😄
For me, one of the great things about *you* doing these kinds of exploration of old hardware means ... I don't have to ... which makes my lovely wife very happy!
As someone who struggled running "modern" things on N36L I can tell you that Unraid didn't want to run just due to hardware being old and "not compatible" in some way. I had the same issue with Proxmox and ESXI (I think it was 5 but can't remember now), but in the end I kinda ditched it into a wardrobe to think more about putting something like rpi5 with pci-e to backplane adapter or something.
I found one of these Acer NASes in a thrift store still brand new in the box.
I might still have one of these and I just recently acquired some older boards for cheap and might be able to mod the one that I have as well. The only downsides are the drive sleds have rubber isolation on their toolless pegs that degrades very fast, and the LEDs being very non-standard wiring
I buyed two of the Easystores in 2009.
Still using them Today for Backups of Important Files.
Have 4x2TB Drives inside.
Only for Storing Datas its Good enough.
Fun fact: Despite being Hyperthreaded, this generation of Atom CPUs lack Out-of-Order execution. Which is great for package size and power savings, but not for performance. So glad I at least had the 330, which is dual-core.
Also, the i945 (?) chipset uses more power than the CPU. Mine has a passive heatsink on the CPU and a fan on the chipset!
Don't worry about "being judged." Just showing 'what ya gotta do' is great to see. Wondering - Don't NAS need much more RAM to help transfer speeds to disk?
looks like fairly common hardware for NAS systems of that age - I still have 3x HP N36l microservers (AMD Athlon II Neo N36L (1.3 Ghz), 1GB NIC, PCI 2.0 expansion slot) in use as NAS boxes and they work extremely well even after 10+ years of use.
I tend to just pile drives into older PC cases with a mnii itx board, load linux, setup the storage, samba and nfs. Done.
Well I can't wait to see if you ran into the same issues I did modifying that thing.
New power supply, modified power cable for the back plane. Slightly modified power on back plane(if I recall that was to try and prevent an issue people were talking about online where the back plane wouldn't work with other boards but it's been a hot minute. I just found that there was one point that had a missing voltage and fixed that, not totally sure if it was needed but it's not hurting at least). I still haven't gotten around to making the front panel working. so it's just a different rigged up button for power right now and no indicates(nothing quite as permanent as a temporary fix I guess). Oh and a new fan and an SSD crammed inside the case for the OS.
It's stupid tight but it works great.
Those Atoms were probably some of the first versions available, no wonder it was so slow. tbh I figured you were going to go right into swapping out the motherboard but now I see you did that in another video, so I'm going to go watch that next.
don't know if somebody pointed this, but it have a tack swith in the back of the board, near the fan header.
Maybe thats a "intrusions detections" and the system only post with the tray in the slot (of with the button pressed).
Just a tought
Hy, I was able to buy a identical case! I'm planning to build something based on n100 SOC motherboard. The SATA backplane can be turn on by shorting some wires on the header...I'm sure you figure out already! Wish you the best!!
The ASUS Prime N100I-D is the perfect upgrade for this! I'd love to see what you ended up using inside.
I'm happy you finally gave OMV a shot! You could have installed it on a USB stick and use all of your bays for storage but I'm not sure how long it would take to boot with those USB 2.0 speeds😅
Yeah, you have to "apply" every change on OMV but on a modern system it only takes a couple of seconds though
I know some old(?) NAS-es uses a small set of mirrors for the root and then RAID-something for the data. You just make a set of partitions for the root, each big enough to hold what's needed and then make a RAID-1 spanning all of them. Then a new partition on each drive for the data. I beleive those I've seen (like QNAP) places the root directly on the RAID-1. I'd rather use LVM in this case to easily separate out the swap. Then the same with the data volume. This will obviously make the rootfs slower than on an ssd, but it'll give you redundancy. I guess you'll have to stick to debian or something instead of openmediavault for this, though.
A Zima board would make a good replacement for that old motherboard. It has the PCI-e slot which you could connect to the backplane with a riser cable. You'd just need to mount it somehow so the ports would be accessible from the back. A 3D printed IO shield perhaps. I'm sure TrueNAS would run on it. Maybe even AuxXxilium Arc Loader for a Synology experience (It's a github project I've been using on older hardware).
I think there's a button on the edge of the board that engages when you slide the tray into its assembled position.
I wouldn't give a 1$ for that MB... But the chasis with the sata backplane and stuff is perfect for a really modern nas. I'll be waiting for that video.
I actually have one of these. I had to use a PCIE cable to get a card working as well. I installed a few OS's on it including Windows and CasaOS. I settled on Windows 10 booting off a USB. I was going to give it to my mom to use for her home business, but she ended up not wanting it. So it's just sitting in my garage in a box again.
These are so weak, they are really only good for file storage and that's really it.
I have a acer NAS so old, that the filesystem isn't even on Windows. The encryption is on the first gen, and Windows 10 only Supports gen 2 and 3.. It has 4 bays, I got it for free, and I think the hardware broke on me.. It came with 2 180GB drives. Software was by acer, and not upgradebale, it had no USB-Interface, no Displayoutput, just a really old NAS!
I can‘t quiet remember what I did with Unraid to get it working on the stock motherboard but I think you have to use legacy boot and make sure the USB device is ready to use it.
10:30 you can use ZFS on Debian by enabling the backports repository (and a tiny bit of terminal input), I don’t think you would want to use ZFS with this system but you could.
I'll be waiting for the sequel as I'm sonewhat interested in SATA backplanes in boxes for a DIY NAS setup
I have an old QNAP TS-451 sitting in pieces on my desk as I’m trying to make something useful out of it. Found it for very cheap on Marketplace like a week ago and thought it might be worth it to try and utilize it as an extra off site backup. I already have my old HP Microserver N40L as an offsite backup but you can’t have enough backups… 😅
I’m first going to try and flash Alpine Linux onto the eUSB DOM that the QNAP OS lived on, but since it’s only 512 MB it needs to be a quite minimal install. Alpine is great since it can run in RAM.
With MergerFS and SnapRAID it should be useful enough for backup.
If that doesn’t work out I’m plugging in a USB header adapter instead of the DOM and shoehorn in a USB to SATA SSD somewhere. Then I’ll have more options for OS. Either TrueNAS or OMV then.
But I really do like Alpine so my suggestion is to try that! You won’t get a UI but it’s simple enough in the CLI. 👍
Try installing windows server 2016 headless and then add windows admin center?
I have one; it's okish; probably best to use with truenas and iscsi(as a 4 bay iscsi enclosure)...... things to know: 1) it has an onboard header for vga, ps/2,etc(diy proably required or the route i took) 2) as this was first gen x64 atom it's a 230,945GC chipset, this is only sata2!(it's slow) 3) lenovo has a model of the same unit with a diff faceplate 4) I slic2.1 modded mine:P..... 5) the esata controller is trash, I modded mine to be usable for the system drive but it was unstable 6) H1110 HBA is probably a good fit and would bring it up to SATA3 ** will be interested to watch the follow up as I did initially try to upgrade mine but bailed at the first sign of trouble(didn't have enough incentive:P)
Now, as it looks like a standard mobo. A modern board may fit. Chassis's are silly prices these days. A fan replacement or new PSU and you may be golden for a PCIe equipped NAS chassis.
I think every TechTuber has that logitech keyboard. It's everywhere, even I have one.
My HP proliant N54L with a dual core CPU and four drivebays and an internal USB slot till serves me well - It would be less painful than this.
The main-board seems to have a small switch on it's side, which may be a security in case you remove the motherboard from the case and slides it out, holding this should in theory allow you to turn the unit on.
could you please do a video on a 2-Bay D-Link ShareCenter NAS?
they used to be some of the cheapest NASs available on the market about 10 years ago
7:45 it was definitely cpu's Fault I have a old laptop that has usb 2.0 ports but debian installs just fine and pretty fast
Looking forward to seeing it modified with a newer motherboard and components.
I'd be willing to bet there's a chassis intrusion detect switch on the mb somewhere (maybe even built into the front panel connector harness..?) that you overlooked.
looking forward to the next one! the case seems really nice for doing a diy remote-to-a-friend setup if the psu can be replaced with say a picopsu or something to make it dead quiet
Sorry. I can't even. You have been judged.
🤣
I think since you only wanted it to be a NAS maybe something like XigmaNAS would work better to give BSD some love
Now we are looking for a good ITX mainboard and a CPU with
an integrated graphics card that can be cooled passively.
Or can use a small cooler.
I guess thingys are interesting... but people are giving away Haswell systems that could easily house 4 hard drives.
Anyway.. another nicely produced video.
I'm sure that most of the processor resources are spent on the web interface, so that you don't just have text with buttons, but beautiful text with beautiful buttons.
In general, installing specialized NAS OS is... well, this is an absolutely correct action, but a little boring. Try bare OpenBSD (or some other BSD), just for fun! Or for suffering, I don’t know. Or maybe FreeDOS, why not?😆
I wish people sell these kind of things in my country as well.
you can tell it was from that era because of the PS3 Spiderman 3 font
id get it just for the astetic. also my acer aspire R3300 would probably make a better nas, atleast in hardware terms because it cant connect more then one hdd.
4:54 i asume the dent is from shipping since there is no absolutely no bend in that image
6:29 there is probably a button or connector at the back that detect if it in the case