Picking the perfect hard disk setup for your home server isn’t as simple as it sounds. For desktop drives, the rule of thumb is easy: go for the biggest single disk you can afford. The benefit of extra space is obvious, but spreading the system and data across multiple disks is more complicated to manage and adds potential points of failure.

Home Server turns this logic on its head. The Drive Expander service merges all disks into one “pool”, erasing the administrative advantages of a single drive. What’s more, if you have more than one hard disk installed, you can choose to have specified folders mirrored onto at least two spindles, space permitting, so installing multiple drives actually improves data integrity. Pick drives of the same size and this option will be available even for the very largest of folders.

There are drawbacks to a multidrive strategy: you need mountings and a data interface for each drive in your system, so you can’t just keep adding disks ad infinitum, especially if you choose a compact case. The noise and power drain of two drives will also naturally be greater than a single unit and, depending on the sizes of the particular units involved, two disks can cost rather more than a single larger drive. For most users, though, the convenience and security of a multidrive system will win out.

Disk speed is also less of a consideration in a server: in everyday use, you won’t be running applications directly on the server, and when you’re accessing server-side files the response time will almost certainly be limited by your client’s network connection rather than the remote hard disk. A modern drive can effortlessly saturate a 100Mb/s wired link, or a supposedly 300Mb/s draft-n wireless connection. Even over a wired Gigabit Ethernet link we found the various drives on test this month all completed backup jobs in precisely the same time.

Home Server will happily subsume USB, FireWire or eSATA disks into its storage pool, but there are plenty of reasons to favour internal drives. Not only are external devices more expensive, but they’re also likely to be noisier, take up more space and introduce the risk of accidental disconnection. Some require an external power source, too. In all, external drives are best left as an emergency option.

It makes sense to start your server with one or ideally two internal drives, potentially adding more in the future should you need to. Many users will be fine with relatively modest drives, such as the Western Digital Caviar SE16. It offers 160GB of storage: this might not seem a lot, but if you only use your server for backing up and storing important data it will go a surprisingly long way, especially if you fit two and use mirroring sparingly. In our tests, this drive acquitted itself respectably and its idle power consumption is low at 7.2W. But at 36c per GB it’s not the best value.

Those in search of more storage could opt for the 500GB Samsung SpinPoint T, the big brother of the previously A-Listed SpinPoint P120. Its power consumption is, not surprisingly, higher than the 320GB drive, at 8.2W but at only 27c per GB, it hits the sweet spot in terms of value.

If 500GB isn’t enough for you, you might be tempted by the 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 or even the whopping 1000GB Hitachi DeskStar 1TB – mammoth drives that provide even lower power consumption in proportion to their capacity, with an idle drain of just over 9W each. Unfortunately, units of this size aren’t yet mainstream enough to benefit from the economies of mass production. The Seagate works out at 41c per GB while the Hitachi is even higher at 48c.

1 Western Digital Caviar SE16
320GB, 7200rpm, 16MB cache, SATA/300
$115
www.foxcomp.com.au
overall
4/6

2 Samsung Spinpoint T
500GB, 7200rpm, 16MB cache, SATA/300
$135
www.mwave.com.au
overall
6/6

3 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
750GB, 7200rpm, 16MB cache, Ultra ATA/100
$311
www.kalkonline.com.au
overall
4/6

4 Hitachi Deskstar 1TB
1TB, 7200rpm, 32MB cache, SATA/300
$483
www.megapc.com.au
overall
4/6