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Originally Posted by Hack&Lube
You mentioned building your own computer before, I would basically recommend that route and choosing your parts well for compatibility and stability. I have never had a problem with hardware in many years now after I stopped cheaping out on components and started buying good motherboards and high end power supplies and providing adequate cooling.
Mind if I ask what issues you are having with hardware that are giving you the headaches? That seems like an odd problem to me, most of the times it is software and the fault is with the OS, not the hardware unless it's junk with poor driver support or low end or mass produced Dell/HP low end boxes. Hardware failures occur with everything, even Apple. If you lost a lot of data on your backups, I understand that is awful. For me, it was the actual harddrives dying (Seagate) and not the fault of anything else. There are much better backup solutions out there like a Drobo or RAID setup with automatic imaging with Acronis, etc.
As for switching to Apple, since everything is Intel based and if you do know what you are doing, you could just install OSX on your current PC hardware and use bootcamp to have both solutions. You are making this all far more complicated than it needs be. You can have both worlds running off the same hardware with some effort. My current machine has Windows Server that I want to run Win7 virtualizations off eventually, a Linux Partition, an XP Parition, and I'm thinking of trying to bootcamp OSX onto it as well at some point to check it out. I have reverse bootcamp on my WinXP right now. Why must you transition over completely? What are your computing needs that you need to go and convert absolutely everything over?
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Apologies for the delay in getting back to my own thread...i started vacation and so finding time on the computer is a little tougher. Thank you to everyone for taking the time to post on this thread.
Thank you for the suggestion of building my own...i have totally been down this road mentally and i agree that this might be the best route. my problem is time. i just don't have enough of it to devote to investigating, building and supporting my own stuff. i find that a crazy sentence, but what i mean by it is that i need to defer to my wife and kids and not being my own at home IT guy. this is the reason that i have moved away from building my own stuff and trying to go with manufacturers, which by my own admission is entirely my actual problem and i may have to go the build my own route in the end. it would certainly be my second choice to having something that "just works", hence the apple direction. i also realize that apple isn't all plug and play either...but hoping less.
the hp ex470 windows home server is the last straw for me. i have had so many HDDs crash on me over the years that i don't actually trust any of them however it is a necessary evil that has to be lived with. seagate, WD, hitachi, samsung; i have had at least one drive fail from all of them. i thought that a win home server from HP would protect me. no. final straw. i managed to recover all of the data that i can tell, and i had actually backed up all of my photos off server just a week or so previously so all of my pictures were good...it is the hassle to rebuild everything. and the repeated hassle with this gear as a home platform.
what specs are you running on your server?
there are things that work well...again when M$ controls things. the xbox integration with the network is well done, as is the streaming. i should add that my own personal computer will always be a microsoft box...just because i need it to do things that i cannot get apples to do; either because they don't or because of lack of end user abilities (heh).
so while i was totally frustrated when i posted this thread and am a little calmer now, the work that i have had to do to rescue the data is completely above and beyond. i could have done all of this without the expense and time of the home server in the first place.
i have really looked at the drobo FS as my NAS device, and with a media server plug in i will get dlna abilities to the xbox and beyond. the beyondraid thing appeals alot. the proprietary data storage doesn't. it equally does time machine and windows. so that looks like a good solution for me at the moment. i need to see more critical reviews and other options to the drobo though...
laptop will just get replaced with mac when the time comes, and desktop will likely be another custom build from a local shop. 360 remains. linksys remains. printers remain.
i'm not married to the apple move; i am married to moving away from the outright freaking hassles that seems to exist on the m$ platform from the multitude of vendors out there.
thanks for your well thought out post and equally apologies for my rambling.