Gadgetory

this is a pretty exciting product that just arrived this is the Isuzu TS mini Windows Home Server so the specs are right here you can see it runs an Intel Atom with one gig of ram it has a 1 500 gig drive but it's available in up to two terabyte configurations so this is a Windows Home Server as I just said and it supports up to two three and a half inch drives by default so why don't we start getting this box open and have a look at it yes mini actually includes besides the standard Windows Home Server stuff a couple of unique Estes features so oh I can't believe I even showed you this brown box there's actually a full proper retail box underneath that actually like looks good and includes probably more information about it that's the bottom one actually it doesn't it includes zero information about it so you can store share and secure digital life now I'm a big fan of Windows Home Server I've been using Windows Home Server since it was in beta and I'm gonna sort of cover a few of the awesome and unique features about it during this video but there's way way more it is so customizable you can really do a ton of different stuff with Windows Home Server software so the first thing we find in the box is your warranty card addressed to dearest customers we find one ethernet cable a power adapter as well as a cable for that and then we have the Windows Home Server software installation CD so they actually give you a Windows disk that's pretty nice or they give you a restore CD and they also give you a recovery DVD oh sorry this is the Windows Home Server installation disc I should know this this is the PC restore CD so this is one of the features of Windows Home Server that is really cool it backs up all your computers overnight every night and then what you do is if you have a hard drive crash completely die in one of your home PCs you basically just put in a new hard drive put this disc in your in your DVD drive and then you run the software off here it takes all the data off the home server dumps it onto the new drive and basically you'd never know that your computer was out here's a server recovery DVD this is actually for recovering the home server to factory defaults so you can either install manually or you can restore it to factory default very cool it includes some extra hard drive screws so if you buy your own hard drive to upgrade the TS me you will have extra screws here's a Quick Start Guide let's see what they include their Quick Start Guide I'm actually curious so they probably show you you connected to the Ethernet you can't run a home server over wireless so that's one of the things that they've pointed out right here is that the home server actually has to be hardwired directly to your router but from there it can backup computers that are connected by wire or by or by wireless it doesn't really matter so you start with guest mini now home server is never intended to be plugged into a monitor so you actually administer the home server from the home computer you use like that custom remote desktop connection to plug into it and that is how it's done here they give you quick instructions on how to install another hard drive on the back how to set up user accounts so with the user accounts you can set you can set up to 10 user accounts and you can give certain people access to certain folders you can limit how much storage can be used by each user you've got all kinds of great control you can oh this is cool remote access you can set whether each user has the ability to log into the home server from anywhere in the world sorry my memory card ran out so you can also select which users can have full remote access not only to the home server but also to any other PC in your house that's running a remote access capable OS like Windows XP Pro Windows Vista Business and up and then Windows 7 Professional end up so that's a very cool feature you can set up all of your sharing folders this is another good one replication so with every folder oh no this isn't what it's about well either way replication is a really good feature with every folder on the Windows Home Server you can actually set whether it is going to be replicated or not so ok I can talk about this more later camera man's telling me to move faster so a su special features these we definitely need to talk about their web-based management software that allows you to manage the home server there X store manager that allows you to easily and directly backup synchronize manage folders on an external USB or eSATA device so not only on the internal drives as well as their web storage so they have a free one-year online account that allows you to backup files from your home server with your internet connection and store them on so there you go let's actually get the TS movie opened up here and have a look at that is this device now my home server is actually just a custom cobbled together nightmare of machinery it consumes a ton of power it's really loud I locked it in a closet but this is meant to be more like an appliance that you could actually store somewhere in your house and have it not look horrible let's just take the plastic off here so it's a very sleek looking thing you've got a nice glossy black finish on the assist ts mini get all these plastics off so you've got a bunch of ventilation up here at the top then you got your power switch which is pretty much all you'll ever need because home server basically runs itself and then I'm just gonna take off this stuff last piece of plastic here at the front okay there's your home server logo you got your little Windows logo you have activity LEDs for both of your individual hard drives here on the front as well as a network LED indicator this thing is incredibly shiny I'm gonna have to be careful not to show the cameraman here I mean look at this let's do the obligatory finger shot or you can see exactly how shiny the side of this thing is on the back we find a ton of extra storage inputs so with the TS mini you can have two internal hard drives and then you can potentially plug in another six external hard drives and another to eSATA hard drives so if you wanted to have something to either backup temporarily and then take it away or something just plugged in permanently that sits right on top of the TS mini you've got all those different options at your disposal next you've got your Gigabit LAN port as well as your DC power in and a Kensington lock just in case you're worried about someone stealing your home server now the whole point of Windows Home Server is data security so open this up it's data security now what I was about to mention before when the camera man so rudely interrupted me was that Windows Home Server has a replicating feature where you can set every folder to safely backup any data on more than one hard drive so if you've got two hard drives installed in the home server if you have one drive installed and one plugged into the back you can set it so that no matter what any data that you write to the home server will be stored on at least two of those drives at any given time and it will actually run those backup checks multiple times daily and that is how you can make sure that you do not lose any data even in the event that your home server suffers a hard drive failure or some other kind of catastrophic crash and I can vouch for this personally because I've actually had several times I've had drives in my home server die and I have never once lost any of the data that I was using the backup replication software for so I have got this open now I don't think I'm gonna go any further here to show you how to install the hard drive but I suspect you just kind of remove some of these screws and it's not too difficult so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the assist ts mini and I hope that you've enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe to my video blog and I hope to be doing a follow up soon with some of the unique casues features that come with this particular home server unit so the cameraman was complaining I didn't really take any clothes looks at the home server or rather not clothes looks we did lots of clothes looks but we didn't do kind of an overall view of it so he wanted to get a closer look at the vents up top and there are actually there must be some kind of a fan under here because I can feel airflow yeah there's two little fans down here I can feel airflow coming up from the bottom of the home server and then you can actually see on the bottom here there is a ventilation and then here this is interesting so you've got the rubber feet here and then you've got kind of a cutaway so that means that even if you sit the home server down on a surface there's still lots of room here for the air to come in under the server and then be pulled up through the top so that you can make sure that your hard drives as well as your CPU in there and everything else stays nice and cool and one thing that I probably didn't emphasize enough in the first video or in the first part of this video is that there is no display there's no display output the home server is accessed only by remote desktop connection through the Ethernet port so thank you for checking out my video on the assuit TSM