How to build your own Windows Home Server rig

The attraction of a home server, such as Windows Home Server, is obvious for any household with several computers. But even if you have just one PC, the technology offers significant benefits -- such as automatic backups that will let you survive a catastrophic hard drive failure without losing any of your precious data.

Microsoft's Windows Home Server is built using the same code base as the company's robust Windows Server 2003, but it's been streamlined (and somewhat limited) for consumer use. In addition to automatically backing up every Windows XP and Vista computer on your network, WHS can monitor the health of all the Vista PCs on its network. If the server is equipped with two or more drives, it will automatically duplicate all its files to provide data redundancy in case one drive ever fails.