I have always wanted to build or buy a windows home server since it came out.  I had participated in the beta for a very short time but was in no big hurry to get one, especially since the pre-built ones where so expensive.  I finally took the plunge when I purchased a refurbished 500GB HP Media Smart EX470 Server at a very good price.  I had shopped around for awhile before choosing the EX470, there where definitely bigger, faster, and newer home servers out but the EX470 had many good reviews and was just what I wanted.  My requirements where pretty simple, must have multiple drive slots, needed to have a small energy foot print, at least 3 USB connections, and a gig network adapter.

So in May my adventure with my home server began. It started off bad, my refurbished server was apparently not very well refurbished, it looked great but the drive that was in it was not reset, it still had someone else password and appeared to still have content on it.  After doing a format and a reinstall I was finally up and running the next day.  After many updates I had it hooked into my home network and all 3 pc’s connected, which included my Windows 7 main pc, windows XP laptop, and other Windows XP PC. I then began tweaking/customizing the server to my needs.  This went well for a day or so then I messed something up, couldn’t figure out exactly what I did wrong but permissions started to break.  I began randomly losing access to files and folders.  I think it must have been one of the add-ons I installed and then removed, but I never figured out how I broke it.  After a day of trying to figure it out, I decide to just reformat and reinstall again, but this time I decided not to play as much with testing a lot of add-ons.  This time around things went much better.  Installed 4 add-ons ( FTP, Download Manager, and two others ), customized some IIS settings, and installed some other software on the server to make life easier. 

After this second setup thing went well for about 3 weeks, but I did have some performance issues.  So I opted for some upgrades.  I ended up upgrading from the 512mb of ram to 2 GB of ram.  An article out on Home Server Hacks made the process easy.  I also upgraded my CPU at the same time, removing the 1.8GHz AMD Sempron 3400+ and add replacing it with an 2.6GHz AMD LE-1640 Orleans, again with the help of an article at Home Server Hacks .  Both upgrades had no issues and there was a noticeable improvement to performance.  At the same time I added a 2 more 500GB HD’s, one to mirror the 500GB HD that the system came with and the other for server backups.

After almost 4 months of use I would have to say I am very satisfied with my HP EX470 Window Home Server.  There are only a few things I would do differently, first I would either build or get a Windows Home Server with onboard video, rdp is fine but sometime when you want to change network settings on the device it would be nice to be able to hook a monitor, keyboard and mouse up to it, just incase.  I would also prefer an additional USB in front, one just isn’t enough.  Overall I am very happy with my Windows Home Server and would recommend one to anyone need a home network storage system.