I know that most traders have at least 2 computers and some of you have multiple computers that you use. You also probably have a couple of other computers hanging around the house/office.
The reason that I consider this an important part of my computer arsenal for trading is that it can get me up and running really quickly if I have a hard disk crash in one of my trading computers.
Although this has never happened to me it is just a matter of time before it does. I haven't tested the restore functionality of this but I've read plenty of reviews from people who have and they say that it's ridiculously fast and painless.
To me it's the number of hours it will take to re-install the Operating System, all the software, and then configure it all. The Windows Home Server should make this task happen in about an hour on most of my machines and without me having to do much.
In addition to buying that $500 machine I also bought a couple of Seagate hard disks which I plugged into it for redundancy.
Although I hope that my computers continue to run smoothly and there are no hard disk crashes I also hope that one day I'll be able to post a reply to this topic and describe how quickly I recovered my trading system if/when this happens.