Tranquil PC SQA-5H Home Server review

Darien Graham-Smith October 7, 2009

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Manchester-based Tranquil PC is serious about Windows Home Server: the company has impressed us before with its tiny, silent T7 appliance (web ID: 121499) and the more expandable T2 series (164685). Now it’s topped the range with the heavyweight SQA-5H.

It’s immediately visible that the SQA-5H is a departure from previous designs. While most home servers keep a low profile, the 5H is a chunky cuboid that looks like it fell out of the 1970s, especially in its optional white casing. The impression is strengthened by the blinking lights that show status and activity – and by the five drive slots, which look more like tape units than the 3.5in SATA bays they really are. The whole assembly exudes a solidity that will reassure those who remember the golden age of computing.

As usual with home server appliances, setup is a breeze. The SQA-5H needs only two connections – a power cable and a wired Ethernet connection to your router. Once you’ve plugged these in and booted the system, you simply install the connector software on each client PC from the provided CD and from here you can configure backups, shared storage, remote access and so forth. The Home Server OS is designed to run completely headless, but if you unscrew the euphemistically-named ‘service plate’ at the back you’ll find a VGA port, along with serial and parallel connectors – so if you really want to tinker with the system you can.

The presence of these standard ports is no real surprise, as the basic SQA-5H-1000 is built on a standard Intel D945GCLF2 board, a mini-ITX package including a dual-core 1.6GHz Atom 330 with 1GB of RAM. There’s also an SQA-5H-2000 model, with more RAM and a bigger hard disk, but we’d say 1GB is plenty for a Home Server and there are cheaper ways to add storage.

This light specification gives the SQA-5H-1000 a low idle power consumption of 31W (peaking at 37W under load). Cooling requirements are minimal too. There is an internal fan, but it’s extremely quiet. Remember, though, that each drive you add will increase power drain by 5W or more, and push up the noise floor.

Although the SQA-5H comes preinstalled with Windows Home Server with Power Pack 1, Tranquil provides reinstallation media should you need them for any reason. The server lacks an optical drive, though, so this is a slightly roundabout process: boot the server from a provided USB card and it goes into recovery mode, listening over the network for instructions. You can then use the restore CD from a client PC to feed a fresh Home Server image back onto the appliance (optionally salvaging user data where possible). It’s not a speedy process – we found it took around an hour – but it’s admirably straightforward.

What about external storage? It’s unlikely you’ll fill up the unit’s five internal bays in a hurry, but sometimes you’ll want to use an external drive, whether for convenience or perhaps to take advantage of Home Server’s ability to back up its own contents to an external device (a process made effortless by the SQA-5H’s one-click backup button). Happily, the unit is equipped with six USB 2.0 sockets, giving bags of room for expansion. There’s also one lonely eSATA port – a nice addition, though the speed benefits will be negligible over most home networks.

One aspect of the SQA-5H that disappointed us was the documentation: in keeping with Tranquil’s green philosophy, there’s no printed manual. Instead, a ropey PowerPoint presentation walks you through the server’s features and functions, with dodgy graphics and poor English.
But when it comes to the hardware, Tranquil really can’t be faulted on the SQA-5H’s attention to detail. The drive bays, for example, are hot-pluggable and entirely screwless, so you can swap drives around without tools. They’re colour-coded too, so if you choose to set up RAID mirroring you can see at a glance which drives go together.

We also approve of the plethora of coloured LEDs giving at-a-glance information about server health, drive and network status and even how full the appliance is. Find the proliferation of lights confusing? There’s a “cheat-sheet” printed on the bottom of the device. And if you find them intrusive, they can be dimmed.

As a cherry on top, Tranquil has thoughtfully installed the open-source Firefly media server, adding the ability to stream music over your LAN to iTunes and network devices.

Inevitably, a high-spec device like this doesn’t come cheaply. You’ll pay £439 exc VAT for the SQA-5H-1000 equipped with just one 500GB drive. A second 500GB will cost an extra £50, making it around £100 more than terabyte-equipped rivals such as the HP MediaSmart (web ID: 145170) or the Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo (web ID: 145170). But if you’re willing to pay the extra, the SQA-5H is a professional appliance whose form and function will suit the serious enthusiast down to the ground.