Why not Windows Home Server? I decided to use FreeNAS over WHS because I wanted something that was extremely light weight and did not have to be installed on any of my 4 storage drives. FreeNAS is versatile in the sense that I can install it on a thumb drive, configure, backup the config, load FreeNAS onto another thumb drive, restore my saved config and I'm back online.

In the event that my host 'drive' fails, I'll have my config backed up so I can easily load FreeNAS onto another usb media device, boot up, load my config and I am in business. If I were using WHS loaded onto one of my storage drives, if that drive failed, I'd lose my OS as well as any data that is not redundant or backed up.

Plus I am a fan of open source operating systems and applications so this won the medal. In order to get your Acer EasyStore H340 to boot up to removable media, you have to go into the BIOS (F2) and change the first boot device to your USB HDD that you have connected. Installing FreeNAS on H340 With FreeNAS, you have several ways to install the OS. You can boot to a LiveCD, use the LiveCD to install it on a hard drive or removable media, or write an image to removable media from another computer.

Acer easyStore H340: Using EON to Fool It Into Being Less of a Piece of Trash. Ac delco car battery serial number. From the actual developer(s) of FreeNAS in having it used on consumer devices such as the easyStore. Now you can abuse the internal flash without quite the same cold dread.

In my case, I did not want the OS to live on one of my storage drives, even if it's only 70+/- MB. I chose to use writing an image to removable media. I wanted something streamlined, not a thumb drive sticking out of the front or back of my case. I looked into microSD cards and spent a little time trying to find a reader that would do the trick. You know those USB Bluetooth adapters that barely stick out of your USB port?

Well, I found a that is the same size. I also stumbled upon the by Buffalo.

It's practically the same thing. You could stuff a 16GB microSD card into the reader I bought and call it the same. It'd be a bit cheaper, $3.72 for the reader and about $27 for a 16GB microSD card on Amazon compared to $140 for the Buffalo. Plus the reader is black with a blue LED which matches the H340 colors. But I digress. To get FreeNAS onto my drive, I had to use.

Once you have the embedded IMG file, you can drag it overtop of physdiskwrite and choose your drive. Generally it will be the one with the least amount of sectors. Be very careful. Choosing the wrong drive might ruin your weekend. After it was written, I plugged my drive into the H340 and booted up.

There is another option for running FreeNAS on the H340. As pointed out in, the H340 has an onboard 256MB flash memory drive that houses the install/recovery files for the provided Windows Home Server operating system. Once you have created a bootable thumb drive, you can copy it to the onboard flash memory. This will overwrite your WHS installation files so be ready to no longer have it. I did not choose this option in case I plan on selling this in the future to someone with a little less technical knowledge. Configuring FreeNAS There are dozens of tutorials for configuring your freshly loaded FreeNAS OS. I've watched and read a lot of them to help get me started.