Product Reviews

Fujitsu Siemens' Scaleo Home Server 1900 is a Windows Home Server - an alternative to network attached storage devices. The large, black case is about the size of a midi-tower PC, which makes it difficult to tuck away unobtrusively. It's quiet, though.

The 1900 comes with two 500GB hard disks, providing a generous 1TB of storage. There are no front-mounted drive bays, but there are two free internal bays if you want to add more storage.

The Windows Home Server (WHS) operating system

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is easy to configure and use. There are no video outputs, so you can't connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse to change settings directly, but this isn't a flaw as WHS is designed to be administered remotely from another networked computer.

Fujitsu Siemens has included some useful WHS plug-ins. A power management add-on allows the Scaleo to be put to sleep and woken at specific times of day, saving electricity and money. TwonkyMedia's UPnP media server plug-in is also included. It has extra capabilities over Home Server's built-in media server, such as access to internet radio stations.

When we ran our performance tests, the Scaleo was fast at writing large files and reasonably quick at writing small files. However, it was far slower at reading files, although it was still one of the quicker Windows Home Servers we've seen.

The Home Server 1900 has plenty of storage space and costs a good-value 51p per gigabyte. Many NAS devices represent better value per gigabyte, but if you're determined to buy a Windows Home Server then this is the best we've seen so far.