Product Description

The HP EX490 Media Smart Server is the all-in-one solution to manage your media: a home server that can automatically backup and protect your digital memories, centralize your media and content for sharing with family and friends, and enable you to enjoy your digital media while at home or away. Network-based backup of PCs using Windows Home Server as well as Macs using Apple’s Time Machine. Media streaming of photos, music and videos to PCs, the entertainment center and remote devices including the iPhone. What's in the box: HP EX495 (1TB plus 3 unused expansion bays) MediaSmart Server, Power cord, Ethernet cable, Software installation disc , PC restore disc, Server recovery disc and Setup Poster and HP support guides. One year limited warranty and our dedicated software technical support available from date of purchase both online and by phone.

Product Details

• Brand: Hewlett-Packard
• Model: EX490
• Dimensions: 5.71" h x 3.74" w x 6.10" l, 34.39 pounds
• Processors: 1

Features

• 1.0 TB SATA 7200 RPM hard drive; 3 open expansion bays for Hard drives - (Total Capacity 9TB)
• Intel Celeron Processor 2.2 GHZ 64-bit; 2GB of DDR2 DRAM
• 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) RJ45 Ethernet - Supports both wired and wireless PCs via a wireless router).
• Powered by Microsoft Windows Home Server software
• 4 USB 2.0 ports (1 front, 3 back); 1 eSATA port (back)

From the Manufacturer

IDEAL FOR

Enlarge Small, sleek design intended for cool and quiet operation

Backup Keep your files safe. Back up PCs and Macs in your home automatically. Storage Free up space on your computer hard drives and centralize your digital life. Save up to 260,000 photos; 227,000 songs; or 600 hours of video with the included 1TB hard drive1. Boost storage capacity as needed with room for three more internal hard drives and up to five external ones. Music Change the music. Stream playlists to any PC & Mac connected to the Internet2, whether you’re at home or away. Photos Share photos easily. Access your photos from computers on your home network and upload them directly from your server to Snapfish.com, Flikr®, Picasa™ Web Albums and Facebook®3. Videos Watch videos on the go. Convert home video files to play on your iPod®, iPhone®, PSP®, Zune and other mobile devices4.

SPECIFICATIONS

Processor 2.20GHz Intel® Celeron® Processor Operating System Powered by Genuine Windows® Home Server software Hard Drive 1TB (7200RPM) SATA, expandable to 17TB5 Memory (RAM) 2GB DDR2 Interfaces 4 USB 2.0 Ports and 1 eSATA Port Network Support Up to Gigabit Ethernet; wired and wireless PCs (via a wireless router)

Enlarge Simply plug the server into your router and install the software on your computers

FEATURES

	Enlarge Manage your files and server settings easily using the intuitive menu
HP Photo Publisher and Viewer File and Drive Backup for PCs and Macs In-home and Remote Media Streaming Server for iTunes® HP Media Collector for PC and Mac Expandable Drive Bays (up to 17TB total5) HP Video Converter Power-saving Sleep Mode Up to 10 User Accounts Plus Guest Account Additional Software Add-ins INCLUDED

COUNT ON AUTOMATIC BACKUP

Your server automatically runs daily backup to keep new files safe Add a second hard drive (sold separately) for file redundancy with Select Folder Duplication managed by Windows® Home Server Recover from a computer hard drive failure using PC or Mac Restoration features Back up shared folders on your server to an external hard drive (sold separately) and store it off-site for an added level of protection

Enlarge Learn more about sharing, organizing and protecting your files in the product tour

ENJOY ENTERTAINMENT FOR EVERYONE

The HP Video Converter automatically formats your videos for Xbox 360, PS3, PlayStation Portable, iPod, iPhone, Zune and more4 Stream music, photos and videos, so friends and family can listen to your favorite song, see your vacation photos and watch your home videos from their own computers—anywhere in the world The HP MediaSmart Server iPhone app also lets you stream files to your iPod touch or iPhone2 Access music playlists from multiple PCs in your home

Enlarge HP MediaSmart Server makes it easy to backup your Mac and share your iTunes and other media to your iPhone and iPod Touch.

KEEP EVERYTHING IN ONE PLACE

The HP Media Collector automatically collects and organizes media files from your PC or Mac, including iPhoto®, iTunes® and iMovie® libraries The HP Photo Viewer helps you create photo albums to share with friends and family The HP MediaSmart Server is ready to grow with your needs: Expand your server’s storage capacity by adding additional hard drives (sold separately) in the three empty drive bays or with the external ports

Enlarge Boost storage capacity to 17TB total using optional hard drives

(1) Storage specifications are based on available capacity following installation. Photo capacity based on average compressed .jpg size of 3.5MB/image. Music capacity based on 4 minutes per song and 128Kbps AAC encoding. Video capacity based on each hour of video recording at 1.42GB for Standard NTSC format in "fair" mode and at 3.60GB for Standard NTSC format in "best" mode.
(2) Requires wired connection to a router; remote features require a broadband Internet connection.
(3) Services are subject to change without notice and some services may not be available at time of product purchase. The available service providers may vary in your country/region.
(4) Copy-protected files may not stream properly. Streaming to a TV requires a digital media receiver (UPnP) or a gaming console like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.
(5) Maximum storage capacity—Only limited by the number of internal hard drive bays (4), USB ports (4) and eSATA port (1).

Customer Reviews

Not easily impressed... but I am now
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.

Not ready for Mac
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.

Idiot proof...even for an idiot like me
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.