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The Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N Home Server is a great solution for today's multi-computer home. I work from my home, and we have 5 computers around the house. About a year ago, my main computer crashed. Even though I had most of my data on a NAS box, it really did not work well and did not do automatic backups of all the computers on the network. My son-in-law Mark took an older computer I had and installed MS Home Server on it. It was great! Automatic backups, access to all my data from any system in the house! Fantastic. No more looking for a memory card to move data from one computer to another.

Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N Home Server for Sale at Amazon

Some issues with this solution, however, brought me to the Acer. First of all, having so many drives in the older computer put a strain on its power supply and caused some overheating issues. It was loud. I had to run the computer with the side panel off because of the heat from all the drives. Also, if I wanted to add or change drives, it was a real hassle.

The Acer solved all of these issues. It was very small, very quiet and well ventilated. It came with the OS installed plus a 1TB drive, with 3 additional "hot swap" or easy-install drive bays. Need more storage? Simply slide out the carrier, insert a SATA drive, and slide it in. All done. I am now running with 3 TB of storage on this quiet little system.

Some people get concerned because they see it is powered by an Atom processor. Don't be. This is not an application server where the apps run on the server. No, you still have the apps running on your system. This acts as a quiet resource in the background ready to serve up your data or back you up on the schedule you set. More than enough power for that.

The OS allows you to easily manage backups on any schedule for any PC on the network. Reminders appear on the client systems if the OS has been unable to back up a specific system.