Posted 10/08/09 at 11:00:00 AM by Norman Chan

Your PC’s hard drive is probably packed to the platter’s edge with hundreds of ripped DVD videos, gigabytes of digital photos from your camera, and tens of thousands of songs. And that’s not even counting the high-definition digital video from your last family vacation that you’re still planning to unload. But with terabytes of media just gathering dust on your desktop PC, you risk losing years of aggregated files when your hard drive inevitably gives out (don’t even think about backing it all up to the cloud). Our solution: Keep all your data backed up on a Windows Home Sever. More than just a generic NAS box, Windows Home Server maintains backups, streams media files, and works as a file share across your home network. And the best part is that you can build one yourself—we’ll show you how!

Continue reading after the jump!

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Posted 05/21/09 at 09:58:16 AM by Paul Lilly

Acer's new easyStore Home Server has made its way to the U.S. in a cool looking cube and sporting Microsoft's Windows Home Server, as well as 1TB of backup storage from the get-go.

"The trend of multiple computer devices per household continues to grow, particularly with regard to mobility. A significant pain point for consumers is how to consolidate and protect their digital data that's spread among multiple devices," said Sumit Agnihotry, Vice President of Product Marketing for Acer America. "Aspire easyStore is the ideal solution for networking home PCs and providing round the clock data protection. Offering remote access to digital data at home from anywhere in the world and automatic daily back-ups, it's the perfect companion to netbooks and notebooks. It's an extremely practical and affordable way to simplify and manage one's personal digital life."

Other hardware and specs includes an Intel Atom 230 processor (1.6GHz), 2GB of DDR2 memory, five USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, and a 200W power supply. But the coolest thing about the easyStore is the ability to add more drives via three hot-swappable 3.5-inch hard drive bays on the front of the cube, which potentially ups the ante up to 7TB of total storage.

The easyStore is available now for $400.

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Posted 03/05/09 at 02:05:15 PM by Paul Lilly

This looks to be a good year for the Network Attached Storage (NAS) market. Western Digital this week announced its new WD ShareSpace NAS with a massive 8TB capacity, and at CeBIT, Acer's showing off its Atom-based Altos easyStore NAS box with support for four hot swappable hard drives, meaning it too should be able to hold 8TB.

Inside the little box sits an Intel Atom 230 embedded processor using Intel's 945GC chipset. Other specs include a single PCI-E x4 slot, five USB 2.0 ports, a LAN port, and a single eSATA port.

Not much else is known about Acer's upcoming easyStore, including when it will be available or at what price point(s). However, Engadget has a bunch of pictures for you to ogle at, which you can view here.

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