Does WHS offer anything that you can’t get with Windows 7 (Professional or Ultimate)? I’m looking at my options for a box that will primarily act as a file server, though it may also act as a server for a video security application. It would seem that Windows 7 might be more flexible.

Backups: If under stand correctly, WHS can do automated backups of other machines, while Windows 7 can’t. However, can’t the other machines schedule their own backups?

Drive Configuration: From what I’ve read, WHS isn’t very flexible with how it manages drives, and puts all data drives into a common collection that is used for all/most storage needs. With a Windows7 machine, I could specify which drives are to be used for each application. I am tentatively planning a machine in which security video storage would be on one drive, and normal file backups would be on another drive.

Media Streaming Stuff: Does WHS do anything that Windows 7 doesn't?

I’m leaning towards building a Windows 7 machine, mostly because I need it to host a server application (Milestone) for security videos. WHS isn’t listed as a supported OS for this application.

Jason

WHS probably does backup better than Win 7 not only because it's automatic, but because it can do a bare metal restore of a PC.

While there is no fine grained control of where files get stored, if folder duplication is turned on, then the duplicated folder will be on a different physical drive (more than 1 drive has to be in the data pool).

WHS is not intended to be an application server. This is why the OS partition is only 20GB (the only partition apps can be installed to). A WHS-centric setup of the video security app would be to have the app installed on a client and then have the video files stored on the server.