If you are recycling one of your old machine to be used as your Windows Home Server box. But also want to give it a hot-swap functionality (like HP MediaSmart Server), I would recommend getting one of those multi-bay hot swap HDD racks. There are quite a bunch available at reasonable prices. The advantages these offer include -

• You don’t have to shut down the server to replace/remove/add hard drives.
• You don’t have to open the case every time you want to add/remove storage.
• You may see the activity on each drive individually (depending on whether the rack supports it).

Here are some available on Amazon.

You can find some more on other stores like newegg and tigerdirect.

Posted by admin in Network, system, windows