Zoostorm Silenced Windows Home Server review

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices are the obvious way of adding storage to your network, providing a central repository for all your files that can be accessed from any computer on your network.

An alternative is a computer specifically designed for network storage - in effect, a server - running Microsoft's new Windows Home Server (WHS) operating system. The Zoostorm is the first server we've seen with WHS pre-installed, and it comes with two 500GB hard disks, providing a generous 1TB of network storage.

WHS is designed specifically for network storage tasks and is based on Windows Server 2003. You configure WHS by plugging a keyboard, mouse and monitor directly into the Zoostorm and using the familiar - albeit modified - Windows XP interface.

More conveniently, you can also configure WHS over your network from another computer using the WHS Connector software or the Remote Desktop Connection utility in Windows XP Professional, Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. WHS Connector's simple setup wizard guides you through the process of setting up your first user account and the shared folders in which your data is stored. Usefully, it forces you to choose difficult-to-guess passwords consisting of numerals and lower- and upper-case letters.

The main WHS Connector window is divided into a series of tabs for managing backups of your networked computers, creating and managing user accounts and shared folders, and displaying information about the available disk space in your server. Other options are available from a Settings dialog box. It's much better organised than the interfaces of many of the NAS devices we've seen.

It's possible to access files stored on the Zoostorm from across the internet using a web browser. WHS will try to alter the appropriate router settings automatically if your router supports Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) port forwarding; otherwise you'll have to configure it manually. You don't need a static IP address or to use a dynamic DNS service to access your files remotely, as WHS can provide a free web address for your server.

WHS automatically enables folder duplication for each of your shared folders by default. This feature is similar to having a RAID 1 array, as it automatically mirrors your data on the second disk to preserve it in the event of a disk failure. It's more flexible than RAID, though, as you can enable it on a folder-by-folder basis, but it doesn't have any of the other potential benefits of RAID, such as increased performance.

Although the Zoostorm is compact and quiet, it is housed in a media centre-style case. This unusual choice means that it has superfluous ports for a server, such as SCART and surround sound outputs. More seriously, there's no extra space inside the case for adding more hard disks. Replacing an existing disk with a larger one is harder than it should be since you have to remove the DVD writer to get to them.

It's possible to plug a USB printer into the Zoostorm to enable other PCs on the network to share it, but if it's not automatically recognised you may have to install Server 2003-compatible printer drivers using a directly connected mouse and keyboard or using Remote Desktop Connection.

It's also possible to use the Zoostorm as a UPnP media server, but while music played back smoothly over our network, video was unwatchable, as the audio and video often fell out of sync. This is not surprising given the server's performance in our file copying tests. It is very slow compared with other servers and NAS devices we've seen, so copying significant amounts of data to and from the Zoostorm will be frustrating.