Who Needs a Home Server?

This week Steve Jobs delivered his annual Macworld keynote address, and while no new Macs were introduced, Apple quietly introduced one product this week that I believe will get a lot of press in the weeks ahead as it goes head-to-head with another product from rival Microsoft that was also quietly announced.

This product is the new AirPort Extreme Base Station, and it wasn't even mentioned during the keynote. Its rival from Microsoft (and a few of its partners) is Windows Home Server.

The AirPort Extreme Base Station is a wireless router, and the Windows Server is a computer, so how are they going head-to-head?

Therein lies the rub: Both products are different answers to the same question - with the problem being that hardly anyone has asked the question yet.

Compare and Contrast

Bill Gates announced Windows Home Server (WHS for short - my fingers get tired) a few days before Jobs didn't announce the new AirPort Extreme Base Station (it's on the Apple website), and one neat little feature brings the otherwise ordinary Apple wireless router into a whole new market segment - the ability to connect to one or more USB hard drives and automatically share them over a network with Macs and Windows PCs.

In contrast, WHS, which is a full-fledged computer, has its hard drives inside (dual drives in a mirrored RAID 1 array, I believe).

Apple allows you to easily add as many drives as you can connect to your USB hub (the AirPort Extreme Base Station has only one USB port), and you can mix in printers as well. Microsoft does the same thing.

These two products start at opposite ends of the "home server" market, with Apple's offering at a low US$179, which is cheap considering it doubles as a print and file server, while PCs with WHS will cost US$500-1,000.

They're very different products, with the WHS adding a lot of cool stuff for Windows users like automatic backups and version saving of files, and allowing you to recover a file to an older version or restore an entire PC should its hard drive fail. Apple's Time Machine in the upcoming Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) will likely give the same capability to the new AirPort Extreme Base Station using a shared drive, but we don't know yet.

The prices are fairly close when you add the cost of a USB hub and a pair of USB 2.0 hard drives to the AirPort Extreme Base Station, although for backup a single drive will probably be more than adequate for most users.

The similarities don't end there. WHS requires another computer to configure it, as it is a headless operating system that wasn't designed to have its own monitor, keyboard, and mouse. AirPort Extreme is about the same, requiring OS X or Windows AirPort software to configure its settings.

WHS is an actual Vista-based operating system, whereas AirPort Extreme uses an embedded OS of which Apple says very little. You can do many of the same things with either, but Apple's device is more like the simple NAS (network-attached storage) drives that are little more than an external hard drive with a network interface and sell for about the same $179.

Who Needs a Dedicated Home Server?

That brings me to my opinion on these things - and the question nobody seams to be asking. Does anyone really need a home server, and, if so, should that home server be a dedicated device?

I'm not convinced. Last week I brought home what was previously my most powerful office computer, an iMac G5. That computer originally served not only as a powerful computer, but also as the office file server. Its large hard drive is partitioned into a 100 GB main partition for the Mac itself and a 150 GB partition that's set up as a network share.

Like the Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station, Microsoft's WHS, and dedicated NAS systems, the iMac can share its second partition with ease, can handle as many external USB or FireWire drives as I want to connect and share them, and, more importantly, it's also a full-featured computer that takes a very, very light performance hit when someone is accessing a shared file.

Even better, when you buy a newer computer, your old one makes a perfect candidate to play home server, either "headless" or with a monitor and input devices that allow it to also function as a real computer. About the only downside to using an older computer as a home server might be the noise from its fan, but many computers are quite silent in their operation (many people bought Mac minis for just this purpose).

I honestly don't see many homes needing a real server or a NAS.

Speed Matters

The big downside to such things, and the reason why they aren't essential yet, is speed. I have gigabit (1000Base-T) networking set up in my office, but to copy very large files, such as the restore images created from my Mac and PC hard drives (I use plain old Disk Utility for Macs and Norton Ghost for PCs), which for my office computers average about 10 GB per computer, takes 10 minutes.

Don't have gigabit ethernet? It would take about an hour-and-a-half over conventional "fast" (100 Mbps 100Base-T) ethernet, and almost three hours over G wireless. Even the upcoming N wireless will still give you about a 40 minute wait.

10 GB is a lot of data - but not in today's world of downloaded movies, music, and photos.

A Better Backup Solution

For this reason, the best solution remains the simplest: a fast external hard drive to back up your even faster internal hard drive, with FireWire faster than USB 2.0 (even if the maximum theoretical speed is slower, as USB is processor intensive and FireWire has its own controller).

Network storage is terrific at handling smaller files, older files, and files that multiple people need access to. Offices benefit greatly from network file sharing, as most offices deal in small files like spreadsheets and documents. But even a 2-3 megabyte file feels much slower opening over a fast network than working from a local hard drive. Still, the price is worthwhile for the security of a backed up file server that tracks revisions and maintains older versions.

Is a home server in your future? Will Apple's new AirPort Extreme fill the bill?

I use the current AirPort Express and already love the convenience of its built-in print server, so I'll probably pick up one of the new AirPort Extreme Base Stations, make it my primary wireless router, and share an old USB drive to hold stuff I don't want cluttering my laptop (older movies and iTunes TV downloads). I'll share my printer over it the way I do now with AirPort Express, and if the two will interface, I'll give the AirPort Express new life as a range extender to give me wireless on the front porch, instead of just the back yard as I have now.