What did you get for Christmas?

I'm assuming by now that the food comas have all worn off, and people are getting back to normal life after Christmas...?

I didn't get much this year, it being somewhat slim, financially.  I picked up a Seagate 1TB SATA drive and a SATA docking station for the major items, and a few odds and ends. 

You might think that's virtually nothing, and from a certain perspective, it is.  But I'll be leveraging that 1TB drive.  My current system has an OS drive of 160GB (I built this box about 3.5 years ago!) and a 500GB RAID5 (3 x 250GB SATA) data drive.  I'm running short on space on both of those drives as you can imagine.  Not only do I need more space on my system, I need space for backups, preferably on a separate system!

Here's the plan, subject to modification as I get going:

• Install the 1TB drive to main system
• Clone the RAID5 data to the 1TB drive
• Break up the RAID5, removing one 250GB drive and reusing the others as a mirrored 250GB drive for redundant storage of important data
• Put the remaining 250GB drive into another box and load a server OS on it
• Use the server to backup some of the main PC's data, plus some from other PC's in the house

Currently, I've done this much.  I decided to play with Windows Home Server to see how it compares to more corporate versions of Windows server OS.  Surprisingly, it was simple in the extreme to install the OS, attach workstations and implement the backup scheme.  The hardest part was finding where to control what I wanted backed up, which resulted in a full server storage problem the first time it tried to do the backups.  Obviously I need more than a 250GB drive to handle all of my backups, but then some of that stuff really doesn't need a backup.

I 'm using the 30-day trial of Windows Home Server, so obviously I won't be leaving the setup this way.  There are major limitations to WHS that require me to choose something more robust.  No domain service, etc.  WHS is good for basic home service, like it says on the tin.  Backups are trivial to implement, and document and media sharing is also a snap.  The WHS console GUI is well laid out and easy to learn.  So if your parents need that kind of 'server', then WHS would be easy for you to install and support.  (You do IT support for your parents, don't you?)  However, I want to improve my Active Directory skills, so I'll need to choose a corporate Windows, most likely Windows 2008R2.  More on that when I get around to it!

So... What did you get for Christmas?  Leave a note in the Comments below!