This sounded interesting until..
..the "It runs Windows Home Server" part
I mean, honestly, who throws a shoe?.
HP has announced an Atom-powered entry-level NAS box for small business. The X300 Data Vault is a network-attached storage (NAS) product in a small tower form factor, and has a 2-core Atom 1.6GHz processor and holds up to four, "not-quite-hot-swap", 3.5-inch SATA drives offering 1TB - 7TB of capacity, 17TB if external storage …
Exactly, not interested in windows at all.
It'd be nice if the OS could be unbundled from the hardware. All too often they sell a nice piece of kit locked down to an inferior software solution. Something I've never understood is why is buying just the hardware frequently more expensive???
so for $600 I can buy a NAS unit that is the many times the size of the competition but still only holds 3 disks internally, does not have RAID, does not have hot-swap disks and that runs Windows and so will need constant patching?
I think that's the worst deal I've ever seen.
which in an earlier incarnation had a silent data corruption bug which went unfixed for months and went unfixed for even longer, is it?
I mean at that point who cares whether it's a NAS or a slightly flashier box?
If this box had been ARM/Linux (as used in any decent modern consumer electronics) rather Intel/Windows (as still used in dinosaur-era PCs) it might have stood a chance.
But it isn't, which presumably means HP are getting a very very very good deal from MS on the licence prices (ie get WHS licences for free and get a continuation of the best-in-class discounts for volume Windows desktop licences). And once you start down that road you're kind of locked into x86.
And to think that Intel used to own StrongARM too. Losers.