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+1 With the exception of their car audio products, Im usually pretty impressed when I hear how good they manage to make small speakers sound. Their products definitely are not accurate or flat, but the reason is because the Bose sound signature is usually equalized to make it sound good to...

Im also curious on how well these "DE replacement" add-ins will handle an OS drive failure. Didnt Microsoft announce that one new feature of Vail will be that it will have a built in function to backup the main OS drive? Or was that before DE was removed?

My Altec Lansing MX5021 computer speakers just malfunctioned...the satellites have no sound but the sub works. I took it apart and could not find any blown fuses, bad capacitors, or burnt chips. Out of ideas on how to fix the internal amp. Hate to see a decent speaker system like this go to...

I know what you mean. Speakers over $1k, I can tell minor differences in the sound quality but not enough to justify spending a few extra thousand to get that bit of extra sound quality. I used to want to have audiophile ears and spent lots of time reading up on speakers and listening to...

Is it the system drive that died or just a data drive?

Thanks for the suggestions. It's hard to sell these guys at a decent price locally because not many people know about how great these speakers are. All of Altec's new speakers are just cheap plastic crap now. The MX5021 was probably their last good product. My only complaint with these...

The Altec Lansing MX-5021 speakers are discontinued and I dont see them around much anymore. Just wondering what you guys think the market value for these would be if I threw them up on eBay or locally on Kijiji/Craigslist? These were a great high end computer speaker system, probably even...

Thanks for the suggestions. I ended up using a program called SyncBack and it is exactly what I was looking for. File synchronizations are much faster than SyncToy, does not leave behind hidden residual .dat files like SyncToy, it can be scheduled, and there are even tweak-able options to make...

I would prefer something with a GUI, rather than command line based utilities. Also, isn't Robocopy for copying over files instead of backing up? I only want to mirror a folder such that deleted files and new files are copied over. No need to re-copy the whole folder contents through each sync run.

I have a WHS which I like to use to keep mirror copies of the important folders of the machines in my network. For years Ive been using SyncToy due to ease of use. I use the "Echo" function to echo the folders on my main machines to the folders on the home server. The problem with SyncToy is...

I also agree in that I dont think you should get an oversized power supply. How many hard drives are you going to use? If it's something modest, I would say to get a small, cheap, and efficient 80plus PSU such as the Antec Earthwatts 380. You really dont need a 500+ watt power supply unless you...

It seems that the focus is more on improving performance than it is on lowering the $/GB. I remember last year you could get a 60GB SSD for $150 or a 30GB for $100 on sale, but of course those were based on the shitty JMicron controllers. Currently, the performance is much better, but the price...

Is it a Dell by any chance? On all of my Dell machines, I cant view HDD SMART info from HD Tune. It's almost as if they blocked SMART and require you to use their own diagnostic tools. Try using CrystalDiskInfo instead.

At -40F (same as -40C) the bearings are going to freeze up and your hard drive wont even work. With most new hard drives, they use fluid bearings, and basically anything below -15C or so the drive will have problems spinning up.

Stupid question, but what's the point of those expensive >$100 cards if youre going to be using WHS and therefore no RAID?

Dont think the drives would be damaged, just get a better power supply. You can get an efficient Antec Earthwatts 380 for $50, so why take the risk with your data.

The extra protection for bit flips sounds like a great idea, especially with today's super high density hard drives. Does the new ECC feature in WHS Vail make having ECC ram pointless then? Does it correct only read errors on the disk, or is it applicable to writes as well?

Yea the newer Seagates should be just fine. That being said though, I still prefer to stick with WD because I dont like how Seagate doesnt use ramp load-unload technology like WD does in their 3.5" drives. Less wear and tear for long term use in theory.

I did a migration from an Intel G31 based board to an AMD 740G based board with no problems other than having to install new video drivers and reactivate WHS. I was VERY surprised because I was almost 100% expecting that I would have to do a reinstall.

Since when does Hitachi have free return shipping for RMAs? Ive been using WD and Seagate due to their advance replacement options.

All drives are going to die eventually. As long as you keep that in mind and always be prepared for it, I see little reason in replacing a drive if it's working just fine due to being paranoid that it will fail soon.

Rather than the Atom 330, maybe look into the lower end AMD based chips such as the LE-1250. They can be underclocked to a point that your power consumption will be roughly at what the Atom draws, but at better performance. Also, the Atom 330 may be too slow for WHS2. Not sure why you plan on...

Youll get the most bass/$ with the Logitechs. It's hard to beat unless you buy used. The Z5500 or Z2300 definitely has alot of bass, but it doesnt really extend particularly low. It starts cutting off at around 40hz.

Ive had SMART tell me that I had bad sectors, but after writing zeros to the drive and doing a reformat, the SMART on the drive was all back to normal. In any case, I dont think SMART should be resetted because it's like rolling back the odometer in a used car. I think only the manufacturers...

Handy list. Im wondering if it is feasible to include peak startup power consumption as well? Im actually not sure where you would even get that data, as most manufacturers dont seem to list it. It might be relevant for those who have a ton of hard drives and are worried about if their power...

WHS never really lets the disk idle. Every hour it runs the drive balancer. Things are always happening in the background. For my WHS even when it's supposed to be idling, the HDD led always blinks atleast once a minute.

Where did you read that? On a newer WD Green I was able to change it to 300 seconds. Strangely, I also have a 1 yr old WD Green where it wouldnt let me change it to 300 seconds so perhaps you are right.

The head load/unload thing to save power isnt necessarily a bad thing. It's just that the default 8 seconds is a bit too aggressive. I used the wdidle tool to set it the timeout period from 8s to 5 min instead.

Isnt the OP's point about SSD longevity originally about data retention? The limited write issue with SSDs has long been known, but for the average consumer, the SSD will probably outlive the system (in terms of limited writes). This is why I think the future of SSD is on the consumer level...

Dell Studio XPS 13 and Voodoo Envy 133. The gloss black is a pain in the ass to clean though.

Wow, very long process just to clone a system drive. Hopefully WHS2 will offer some sort of system drive redundancy or atleast an easier method to replace the system drive. Im assuming the partition expanding part doesnt apply if you are cloning to a drive that is of the same size? So the...

Your 16MB doesnt have the newer 25nm process which is what is being discussed here. I would estimate that traditional, older flash memory chips have data retention in the order of 10-20 years.

I hope they dont rush into these things. It seems that the higher density the drive, the less reliable they've become. Of course I dont have a large enough sample size to make this conclusion...but it seems that a good portion of my newer hard drives develop bad sectors or write errors within a...

But Server 2008 R2 only requires a 1.4ghz 64 bit processor: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/system-requirements.aspx Wonder why Vail will need more power?

Yea I guess what I mean by upgrading was that is it possible to make the switch from WHS1 to WHS2 and keep the data pool intact (perhaps duplication has to be enabled)? Some people have TBs of data which I am not even sure how you would migrate that. As for the system drive backup...I wasnt...

Do you think it is possible to do an upgrade install from the current WHS to Vail? How exactly does the system drive backup feature work...is it fairly straight forward to the user, maybe with the ease of use that duplication has?

You can use 5 year+ old hardware and that will run WHS just fine. But a more economic way to pursue this is to evaluate how much power you need from your WHS and not to overbuild it. Not only will you save significantly more in power costs, but in 5 years from now they will probably have...

What are you doing with your server that requires something that powerful? Both i3 and i5 processors consume too much power for basic server needs.

Can you do an upgrade install to easily migrate data from your old WHS? Also, is there any sort of redundancy taken into consideration in regards to the main OS drive?

Did you buy them from a retailer with bad shipping practices like Amazon/Newegg? I would have thought the WD Green series drives are very reliable. Some people claim that the physical drive on the consumer grade Green is the same as the RE series enterprise drives. Also, the error rate on...