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5 Comments

1. Whaledad
   

   Working in the computer industry for over 25 years, I’m not easily impressed. Two quad-core processor, 8 GB of RAM and 2.5 TB of storage in a home pc… nice, but just “more of the same”.
   
   Most of the computer innovation of the last couple of years has been “more, faster and bigger”, but nothing revolutionary.
   
   However, the new MediaSmart EX495 is truly amazing: the speed, the capacity, but more importantly: the ease-of-install, and ease-of-use that DON’T “handycap” the “power user”, are fabulous.
   
   I had the server up and running in a few minutes. It’s now supporting 6 users, 1 MediaSmart Connect x280n (why did they stop making that!?), and 1 Roku M500. I added a second 1.5-TB hard drive and have already filled almost half of the total capacity (25,000 songs, 28,000 pictures, 600 videos, and loads of other stuff). This includes doubling almost every directory (I like this feature over Raid 1 as it provides much more flexibility), and backups of all PCs. The most impressive was how it enables external (secure) access by directly interacting with the router to open/forward the right ports. And it was immediately successful.
   
   Still to do: connect a USB cable to my UPS and try to set up graceful shut down.
   Rating: 5 / 5

2. CaliDuckPhan
   

   This little guy got delivered by Amazon a few days before it’s original release. I am not much of a directions guy, but was extremely pleased with how easy this was to set up and how intuitive it was when it came to setting it up. I’ve got 1 workstation, 2 netbooks, and 2 laptops that backup wirelessly to this guy. If they are already on the same wireless network, it’s simply a matter of clicking the ‘add computer’ button. There’s no need to fuss with any of the backup settings unless you are particular, as it will do the work automatically for you. You can then either access your files via the console or remotely at your convenience.

   I can’t stress enough how nice and convenient it is to be able to centrally access all my files without having to shuffle files back and forth between the local hard drives and having piece of mind knowing it’s being backed up automatically. I previously did this with Time Capsule which while it worked at times, was tempermental and slow. I’m not sure how well this will work on Mac, but I am running various flavors of XP and Vista in 32bit and 64bit configs.

   I even decided to add another storage drive (Seagate Barracude 1.5tb 7200rpm)for redundancy. Adding storage was a simple as pulling out an open drive bay, popping in the new drive, then going into the management console to click through the add storage wizard which took less than a minute. Now I’ve got 2.6tb’s of storage, more than I’ll probably ever need and 2 open bays to expand down the road.
   Rating: 5 / 5

3. Stanltaaf
   

   I’m technically inclined, but not an engineer. I have some experience with this topic… I first built my own server with spare parts and run it at my home. I am reviewing this because I bought it for my parents and installed it.

   Part 1: The software, and what HP brings to the party:

   Windows Home Server is actually a program (based on Windows Server 2003 with enhancements, optimized and pre-configured), and is easy to use in a home. And it is good, all by itself. HP’s contributions by adding on its own ‘add-ins’ make the software better.

   As a sample of what this means for you, an example: If you are recording tv shows on in Windows 7 media center you can offload your shows here, and still stream them giving you instant access anytime. The new update to the software also makes it so you can set windows 7 up to offload your recordings from your Windows 7 pc to the server automatically so you don’t tie up your computer’s storage space. If you want to take a look at what that kind of pc setup might look like, just search listmania for “htpc build”; I’m the first search hit.

   So what does HP bring to this? If you have media files that you want to convert for viewing on a mobile device, HP bundled an add-in transcoding software on this so you can offload that work to server’s CPU and not tie up your computer while you’d rather be surfing or playing games or whatever else you do to make things better. There are a lot more add-ins they bundle with this, but it’s exhaustive and there isn’t the space.

   Bottom line, there are plenty of ‘WHS’ solutions. But my take is that HP has put a lot behind making this a great software bundle, and I have to say I’m impressed with the bonus they bring (and I’m picky about this stuff).

   Part deux: What’s so great about the hardware.

   The pictures make it look big. But it is small – about the size of a small bread box turned on end. I was surprised when I unboxed it. It’s also easy to add hard drives. It comes with one, but you’ll get hooked and want to add one. Just take out a tray, pop in a recent generation “SATA II” drive and replace the tray in the server and it self configures. I recommend buying one straight away anyway because then you can turn on ‘file duplication’. That means the server at your specific direction will keep duplicate copies of folders you select on two separate hard drives in the server as insurance against mechanical failure.

   You can also back up the system drive, which I’m learning how to do, and you need an external USB drive to do that.

   Energy-wise It pulls about 4 to 6 watts under normal operation. Yet another reason to buy this if you are power conscious. Don’t let that figure fool you. With 2GB of ram and the atom processor, there’s plenty of oomph for most people’s needs.

   Summary:

   Solid build, solid software, continuous integration to Windows backed by a very committed enthusiast community that makes it so you don’t have to think ‘what if my hard drive crashes/computer shorts out/child vandalizes my computer?

   It’s automatic and low-no maintenance. In short: a ‘no-brainer’.

   I like this one because it has extra drive bays. There are configurations that just use one hard drive, but I would pass on that.

   If you are buying an add on drive, a Western Digital Caviar Green is fine. You don’t need high speed drives for this use.

   Cheers.
   Rating: 4 / 5

4. H. Mansoury
   

   My home network consists of two mac laptops, one windows based desktop which I have been using for backups, and an XBOX 360 and two iphone 3Gs. I bought the HP Mediasmart EX495 for backups as well as to use it as a media server. The Mediaserver arrived a couple of days after order was placed.

   The server itself is extremely slick and well designed. It has this shiny black exterior which seems to be able to withstand scratches very well. The server has four vertically stacked drives, the lowest one is occupied by the 1.5 TB drive supplied by the manufacturer. I bought a 1.5 TB seagate drive and was able to install it in 2 minutes without problems. The tower turns on very quickly and is quiet despite strong fan in the back. The front has three lights that show the status of the network connection and such in beautiful aqua color. Each drive has an aqua-colored light as well.

   I set up the server using the windows XP os on parallels desktop on my macbook pro without any problems. The server actually downloads some updates from Microsoft which can be a hassle if you are not used to it. After the first setup, you can administer the software from the macs using the remote desktop. After initial setup and installation of the software (which is actually a kernel extention in mac) I kept getting “network health” alerts, forcing me to update the newly installed software by actually finding it on the server rather than downloading it from the internet. It took me a while to figure this out but eventually managed to. The Time Machine setup was tricky as well. The software kept prompting me that the “Mac shared folder” was deleted and had to be recreated. It took some snooping over the internet to figure out that it needed me to actually create a new folder on the server and name it mac via the server console. Finally I got the Time Machine setup and working.

   The other features were relatively easy to figure out. It comes with the web based access which can be setup easily and it can be used to access your files from anywhere. One problem is that when you supply the login information on this webpage, often times you couldn’t find a logout button on most of the subsequent web pages.

   The other feature is iTunes server which I didn’t bother with since iTunes 9 has a good sharing already built in.

   The main draw for me was the Media collector that supposedly will scour your connected computers for media and copy them to the server and prepare them for sharing. The connected computers appear on the Collectors console by their network names, which can be difficult to decipher for some people. My Macs did appear on the list which was reassuring however after waiting one whole day I realized no file had been copied to the server. I reinstalled the software, restarted the server and the client computers to no avail. It should be noted that your user ID and password for the server should match with your computer’s ID and password, which seems like a security risk. I would think that the right way would be to supply each client computers access information separately and save the information in a keyring, rather than forcing uniform access info on all computers. Anyway I could not get the media collector to work with the macs. I turned on the AFP, SMB and FTP file sharing on the macs and still it did not grab the files. Eventually I called the HP customer service and I was informed that they have a brand new patch that will make this work and they can email it to me right away. I installed the update without any problems and noticed that not only the media collectors did not work, the Time Machine backup was broken to. I went through restart, reinstall, restart, cycle for the computers and server and still no dice. Finally I gave up. I could not justify paying for a NAS (without reliable media server features) at $700 price point.

   A few observations:

   1. The documentation both on paper and on the website are poorly prepared and sometimes contradictory. It seems like they have used the older servers manual as a template and try to update the material but some of the old information is left in.

   2. The notification system on the server also can be confusing and challenging to decipher (see the “mac shared folder deleted” fiasco above.

   3. The customer service response was fast but did not fix the problem in my case

   4. Mediaserver does not have RAID setup options. Instead the added drives can be used to “backup the servers” i.e mirror it, or can be added as “extentions” to the main drive.

   5. You can download a software to your iPhone from iTunes app store for free which supposedly allows you to stream media stored on your server to the iPhone. I could login to the server from my iPhone but I could not see any of the media that I had transferred to the server.

   6. There is a video converter on the server which can automatically convert the videos to standard and mobile based on the settings that you determine upon setup. The converter in my experience is very fast but it may not work correctly with all video formats. For example I uploaded some MKV files and the converter started chugging away at them merrily in a few seconds but it ended up mangling the audio and occasionally there were some frames dropped from the video.

   7.Finally, recovery from Time Machine is somewhat complicated. My understanding is that the server does not support Bonjour service. Therefore you won’t be able to restore from Time Machine by just rebooting from the Mac installation DVD. You have to have read the manual and created a special USB thumb drive. In the event of hard drive failure, you should reboot from the USB drive so that the MediaSmart client software is launched then switch to the install DVD and then restore from the server drive once it is discovered.

   Anyway I am returning this unit and will look for other solutions that can play nice with mac.
   Rating: 3 / 5

5. Daniel Holme
   

   First, about me: I’m a very technical customer. I’ve got a complex home network, a great set of media computers throughout the house, and an all-digital media collection (all of my photos, music, and videos–well over 100,000 assets). I’ve tried several approaches to meet the storage and functionality needs I have. Most successfully, I used the ReadyNAS NV+ for several years, slowly upgrading it to 3TB of useable storage.

   The *primary* driver for moving to Windows Home Server and this device was that Windows 7 is not able to index files on servers unless those servers are running Windows Search technologies, so all of a sudden I couldn’t index my TB of media (without taking them “offline” which is not realistic). So I purchased the HP MediaSmart EX495 in order to serve media and files to all of the comptuers on my network, but more importantly to index them.

   I was VERY pleasantly and overwhelmingly surprised by how much more I got from this server. Its streaming capability (I just “open” iTunes and everything is there), media collection (it “scoops up” media from other computers to centralize it), and remote access features are particularly useful for me. Because it runs Windows, I can also do other things with it that a NAS device could never do. And the backup functionality worked so well that we were surprised to suddenly see 1TB “disappear” because it backed up all of the systems in my home (I’ll need to tweak that).

   The only thing I’m not so thrilled with is the trial version of McAfee that comes with it. I’ll be switching to something else. But unlike a lot of other products from HP, this WHS device is not overly burdened by bloatware.

   I am THRILLED with the device. I will be in the front of the line to buy the next revision that is based on Windows Server 2008. Until then, my next step will be to buy a SanDisk MobilStor external RAID device so that I can add another 6TB+ of storage to the server, which itself will be at around 4TB. Hopefully that will last me for a year But I’ll be taking advantage of the EX495′s expandability, for sure.

   Whether you are a technical user or a non-technical customer, you’ll find this device to be a great addition to your home (or small business) network.
   Rating: 5 / 5