Additional details came through today on Tranquil PC’s Harmony Home Server (T7-HSA) which I posted about a few days ago. There’s still a few parts of the specification outstanding, but here’s what we know right now:
- The unit has been named the Harmony Home Server
- Dimensions: 224 (d) x 232 (h) x 57 (w)
- Weight: 2.9kg
- Connectivity: VGA, SVideo, Audio L&R, Ethernet (10/100), PS2 Keyboard/Mouse, USB 2.0 x4, RS232, 12v DC input
- Near silent running - fanless
- Power consumption of 24 watts - highly efficient
- Aluminium chassis - case acts as the unit’s cooling system
- 500Gb hard disk provided
- 4 USB Ports available for external drives
- 24 Months RTB Warranty
As yet, the motherboard, processor and memory specifications are still to be announced.
With such a low power output, small footprint and silent running, the Harmony is looking like an excellent home server - Gigabit Ethernet would have been a great feature for maximum throughput, but I’m finding that even high definition video works fine with a 10/100 Ethernet card.
More details as we get them.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
This is nice and all, but I thought the one of the big selling points of WHS was Drive Extender so you have protection against hard drive failure. This still gives you a single point of failure with your data if you move it to the shares.
Yes, you can add external usb hard drives, but will Joe Average understand the importance of doing so? I can see a lot of people picking one of these up and thinking they are all set when they still have the SPOF. IMO, every OEM WHS should come with at least 2 hard drives standard.
For someone a little more savvy (but not enough to want to build their own WHS), will it make him upset that he is dropping a few hundred on this server and then he still has to drop another hundred on an external hard drive to get full use of one of its most important features?
I’m just trying to think how my parents would… unless they were explicitly told to do so, they wouldn’t pick up the extra drive. I could see them moving the family pictures up here, have a hard drive failure, and blame the WHS.
Sorry for the rant…
July 24th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Thoroughly disappointing! The lack of gigabit ethernet alone is a deal killer. After switching over to GbE and getting hooked on the incredibly better performance it gives for moving large files around the LAN, I’ll never go back. Plus, as Pool Shark mentions, relying on a single drive is a terrible idea.
I like the power consumption (for an “always on” device this is very important) and I like the “near silent” running given where I plan to place it. But not at the cost of performance and reliability.
July 25th, 2007 at 2:37 am
I’ll reiterate what everyone else has said.
WTF is wrong with these people? No Gigabit Ethernet and only one internal hard drive? What a friggin bad idea.
People will store all of their music, photos, etc. on there, and then the thing will eventually crash. Will there be any redundancy or backups? No, of course not. That would have too much sense.
July 25th, 2007 at 5:01 am
I don’t really have a comment about this particular device but a general comment about WHS hardware instead. I assume that hardware manufacturers intending to build WHS devices are reading this blog and this comment is aimed at them.
I would like to see rackmount form factors. I realize that doesn’t fit into the “sense of cool” design considerations when it comes to marketing consumer electronic devices but if someone doesn’t come out with a rackmount version, I’m going to have to build my own.
I’m positive that it would be a popular form factor — at least with some of the more technical crowd.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Well,
looks like they are using some kind of a Via Epia motherboard but no GB Lan and only one internal drive. That would be ridiculouse.
Even “highly efficient” power consumtion sounds terrible in my ears. I guess we could save some € on the long run bill using 2 2,5″Hdd …
July 25th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
wow, 24 watts is pretty impressive. my whs box is drawing a bit over 200 watts. Of course I have 10 drives and ~ 3.5 TB but the base box with two drives was consuming ~75 watts before I started stacking the drives in.
No GB lan is a mistake and, as everyone else has pointed out, only one drive is a very bad idea.
July 30th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Last time I check most 1080p HD video runs at 25MBps or more… which would be impossible over 10/100.
July 30th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Yep just checked the file - my bad - it was a divx file from a 720p source.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:38 pm
I think it may make a lot of sense to market devices like this carefully - this one would be great for someone who has several computers that they should be backing up (but aren’t) but it wouldn’t be ideal if their primary need is for media sharing.
I think multiple hard drives will be a big selling point if you’re going to offload media files there in shared folders, but if you store your photos on your PC, and you add a backup server that duplicates the whole PC (including the photos) then you don’t have a single point of failure after all. And honestly, I don’t know if the average user will move photos to a share folder.
Anyway, the main point I was getting to is that something like this should be pushed hard as a “backup server” but not as a “media sharing device” but once you have redundant drive space, you market it that way, particularly if you have the network bandwidth.