I wish EVERY NAS was made like this one

Modify modify modify, waiting for the sequel 😊

I liked Windows Home Server. One of the features was it would let you do essentially bare-metal backups of windows PCs. It ran a PXE boot server, so if you have a hard drive failure on your laptop or desktop, you could replace the drive, boot from the network, and do a bare-metal restore of any of the backups you'd made (not necessarily the latest one if you didn't want to). It made that level of backup easy for even non-technical people.

So many of those old atom processors were crazy slow even when they were new. I'm impressed that you got it to do much of anything. Now I'm looking forward to the upgrade!

system didnt boot when motherboard out is because of the chasis intrusion built into some prebuilts they do not like to turn on outside the chasis

I cant wait for the upgrade video

you hit the jackpot with this, generic nas cases are more than that, all you need is a nice little itx board, and some drives, and its go time....

Oh my god, i have the same designed desktop from that period when we got it in 2009, seeing a nas with that same look is wild!

I would slap a PCIe to NVME (or M.2 SATA for compatibility) adapter into that slot, and use that as a boot disk to reclaim that 4th drive bay :)

some old systems don't have a bios screen I learned the hardway..

I miss Windows Home Server. When I was in the military I had a home server that I could use to access my media library at home while I was deployed overseas. It was awesome.

That hostname though.. "asspire" probably describes it best😂

Looking forward to your upgrade video to compare/contrast with my own modded H340. I use it as a test NAS -- trying settings/plugins/containers before deploying to my real NAS so I don't eff up the system I rely on! The upgraded H340 is a great little 4-bay NAS with such a tiny footprint. The bog standard ITX tray and flex PSU mount made it seems like it would be an easy upgrade. Splicing molex/SATA power connectors onto the original backplane connector was simple, too. The real "fun," as I'm sure your discovered, was decoding the proprietary pinouts -- and discovering that the backplane needs an extra +5V line (that I tapped from the new MB's USB headers). Unfortunately, some of the front panel functions are GPIO controlled, so those remain unavailable. Same with the individual drive LEDs unless you use an HBA card (I wish Acer made the LEDs come off the backplane instead of the MB, but they wanted to go all fancy with the bicolored LEDs to also give SMART status instead of just having simple activity LEDs).

Windows Home Server was pretty darn cool for its time, you should try and explore it some day. Not useful at all today though.. My first homeserver was an HP EX475 and that thing ran for years before I replaced it. I still have it, but it runs Ubuntu now and is just for backups.

Man I can't wait for the upgrade. For only $60 with a FlexATX psu, drive cages and backplane included that's an absolute STEAL for the case alone! I'd still be curious too if the poor atom CPU would be good for anything like a custom network switch or router with that PCIEx4 slot.

These ancient Atom processors predating Silvermont(J1900, N3150 etc) are somewhat useful if one is paranoid about CPU backdoors, as they don't even support out of order exceution and speculative execution. Though you would want something like D510 as you get 2x performance from dual core, which seems to finally arrive on H342. The case looks very tempting for modding, though flex atx power supply might be a PITA to manage.

I used to have one of these, loved that OS.

Windows Home Server didn't support raid att all, it added all disks as a pool more like jbod, but it still was a interesting OS, I used it from release to eol but had a more powerful system, there was program so you could rip your cds and dvds if you had an optic drive, no need for monitor or keyboard, when you insert a CD, it automatically been riped and data downloaded, all settings done from client, then it just worked

Wow. This channel is growing fast. You're doing something right

I didn't realize Acer made an Aspire NAS.

Oh, I have one of these. I put in a 4th gen intel into it years ago. Had to splice in a wire off the backplane to one of the orange (3.3v?) lines on the atx connector for the backplane to function.