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• Hp Mediasmart Server Ex495
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What's in the box: HP EX495 (1.5TB 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. By now you’ve hopefully read the release announcement as well as my full review of the new HP MediaSmart Server EX490 and EX495. Once I finished the review, I almost immediately started taking apart my EX495, purely in the best interest of all you readers, of course. A HP Mediasmart Server; Another PC; A 3.5″ SATA Hard Drive (you need something to store your files on right?) A USB Thumb drive (at least 1GB, but 2GB would be ideal) A Blank CD and CD-RW or another USB Thumb Drive of at least 1GB (or a Zalman Virtual ODD)) Stick the kettle on as it may have boiled by the time you have finished this whole. Hp Mediasmart Ex495 Server free download - Radmin Server and Viewer, MySQL Database Server, HP Webcam, and many more programs. Don’t forget to round out your shopping at the HP computer store with our full assortment of computer accessories, monitor and displays, software, and much more. From cables & components to portable hard drives and multimedia accessories, you’re sure to find the computer peripherals and accessories you need.

Wow how time flies. On Christmas 2009, my wife gave me an HP MediaSmart EX490. If I was a geek back then, I’m really a geek now! Thanks to the MediaSmart, I’ve learned a lot. Especially about some things I never really gave much thought to, like streaming home media. I wanted the server for backups, but it turned out to be so much more.

I helped my trusty EX490 along with a CPU upgrade and more memory, and it helped my family out by not only keeping our data safe, but also by streaming media for the young’ins. My daughter was 2 at the time I got the server and my son was born in April 2010. So the media kept us entertained too for those middle-of-the-night feedings.

Less than a year later, Microsoft pulled the carpet out from beneath our feet by announcing they were killing off Windows Home Server’s most endearing feature, Drive Extender. Many folks vowed to stay with WHS v1, no matter what Microsoft was going to put out. I too had invested a lot of energy into WHS v1, with my free Home Server SMART add-in, which many of you continue to run today. And every now and again, a donation comes in. Thank you!

As someone who works in IT and lives on the bleeding edge of technology, I felt the desire to move on to WHS 2011 despite Microsoft’s transgressions. A friend of mine was selling an EX487, so I bought that off of him, and like the EX490, upgraded the CPU and memory. Now I could tinker with WHS 2011 while still running WHS v1!

Despite the lack of Drive Extender, WHS 2011 did a good job. And it gave me an opportunity to come out with a new edition of Home Server SMART, and its companion shareware product WindowSMART. The fact that WHS 2011 supported the x64 processor and full 4GB of memory was a big help too. Plus, a couple of private developers kept the Drive Extender spirit alive with their offerings – Drive Bender and StableBit Drive Pool.

Sadly Microsoft abandoned the “home server” concept after WHS 2011. They released Windows Server 2012 Essentials, followed by an R2 version, but neither were ever priced appropriately for home users. Plus Microsoft’s first crack at resurrecting Drive Extender, now called Storage Spaces, fell short of the mark. I appreciate that Microsoft realized the err of their ways in killing off Drive Extender in the first place, but the first release of Storage Spaces seemed a lot slower and not quite as reliable as Drive Bender or StableBit.

Then a couple years ago, my trusty EX490 seemed to give up the ghost. Thankfully it was just a bad power supply. A good company called Overtek in the UK came to the rescue with a compatible power supply, and my EX490 was back up and running.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve got a small business running from both my EX487 and EX490, and I’ve got another EX490 on the way, bought from a fellow MediaSmartServer.net member. A friend of mine runs a small business and wants an onsite backup capability, along with remote access. She didn’t want a budget buster, and knowing how reliable the EX490 is, I was happy to order one up for her.

While some may regard the EX4xx servers as old, obsolete and outdated, I beg to differ. Arguably I believe this is one of HP’s best products, even if it never gained the market traction HP hoped it would gain. It’s small, reliable, still supports the latest operating systems (including Windows Server 2012 R2) and also supports the latest high-capacity hard drives. And SSDs too! Thanks to our good friend Charles and VOV Technology, you can add video and keyboard/mouse capabilities.

Yes, the MediaSmart Server is a powerful little machine. Over the years I’ve tried out several different heavy-hitting applications on it, like SQL Server, SharePoint and even Exchange. It ran them all, just not at once.

Today my EX487 and EX490 press on…backing up everything, streaming media and providing me remote access no matter where I am. It’s been a fun five years. Thank you HP for building us such a great product, and thank you for HP for building a product that helped bring together such a great community here at MediaSmartServer.net!

Article by Alex Kuretz

I'm Alex Kuretz, and I'm the founder of MediaSmartServer.net. I was the Lead Test and Integration Engineer at HP for the MediaSmart Server until April 2008 when I moved on to other opportunities outside HP. I've kept active in the Windows Home Server community, creating several add-ins and helping users make the most of their Home Servers.

HP recently released two new versions of their MediaSmart server, the EX490 and the EX495. These servers have new hardware including faster processors, more memory, and higher capacity hard drives. They also come with the new 3.0 version of the MediaSmart Server software.

Features

• Easily and automatically backup and protect the content on your home PCs and Macs.
• Access your media from anywhere you use the Internet – across your home or across the world. You can even give your family and friends access.
• Enjoy an exceptionally small footprint with large capacity. It’s only 5.5″ (w) x 9.8″ (h) x 9.2″(d), but it’s designed to grow with you. Built-in hard disk drive bays and expansion ports increase storage capacity.
• The HP MediaSmart Server easily fits in your network supporting both wired and wireless PCs (via a wireless router) and requires a wired connection with broadband Internet for remote access.

The MediaSmart servers use Windows Home Server (WHS) to handle backups, and WHS does backups really well. In its original form, WHS could only be used with Windows Machines; however, that was not good enough for HP, so they worked with Apple to make it compatible with Macs and Time Machine.

An alternate use for the Home Server is to store all your media in one place. Having your media in one place has many benefits, one of those is being able to access that media from anywhere, including the internet.

The MediaSmart servers are extremely small. With dimensions of 5.5″ W x 9.8″ H x 9.2″ D they are about half the size of a desktop computer. They are small enough that they can be kept right on a desk or hid away on a shelf, either way they are not going to take up a lot of space. Despite their small size they are extremely easy to expand. There are 4 internal drive bays, 4 USB ports, and an eSATA port. Using these ports the expansion possibilities are nearly unlimited.

The MediaSmart servers can connect to a network with either an Ethernet cable or Wireless connection. Having built-in wireless gives you the most flexibility when deciding where to place it, you literally only need a power plug and a wireless connection and you can store the actual machine anywhere. However, for performance and reliability I recommend you use a wired connection. In fact, when restoring a computer the Windows Home Server software recommends that all the computers be connected with Ethernet cables.

Design

I have written reviews of both the Windows Home Server software and the HP Media Smart server, you can read about them if you are new to this topic and you want to get up to speed. HP sent me the EX495 so in this review I will only be covering the stuff that is new or improved. If you find something that is missing from this review you might find it in one of the other two reviews.

One of the biggest changes to the MediaSmart Server EX495 is a hardware upgrade. Below are hardware specs for both the EX490 and EX495.

The software has also undergone an upgrade as well. With the upgraded hardware HP has been able to add several new features to the MediaSmart server. Some of the new features in this version (3.0) of the software include a brand new look, updated video conversion, media collection, and better OS X support.

The improvements to OS X support include Mac Media Collection, Server Administration via Mac, and faster Mac image level backup and recovery.

The most notable software change is with the MediaSmart Dashboard. The MediaSmart Dashboard is now organized into categories that offer quick access to many important features. At the top of the menu are a series of overview pages. These pages include Tour, System Status, and Mac Overview.

The most impressive of these pages is the System Status. This page shows a wide variety of information about the system. Starting at the top left of the page there is a notification area for home server issues, below that are boxes with information about add-ins, software updates, remote access, and power management. On the right side of the page there is a large box with storage information, and below that is another box with information about Network, Memory, and CPU usage.

The next group of options in under the title of Media. These options all relate to gathering, converting, and sharing all the media on your network. These options include In-Home and Web streaming, an iTunes server, Media Collector, Video Converter, Photo Publisher, and Media Server.

There is also a change to the web interface. As you know from reading my past reviews Windows Home Server is capable of sharing your media online through its built-in web page. This is great for when you are on the road and you want to access your favorite TV recordings, music, or ripped DVDs. With the HP MediaSmart EX495 this is even easier than before.

Performance

So with all the new hardware and software covered, it is time to see how well they work together. One of my biggest concerns is that the new functionality will bog down the server and it will become unresponsive. So I set out to test some of the new functionality to see how it performs.

Before I could do anything I had to setup the server and install the software on my computer. The process was quick and painless and once it was done I was ready to go.

The first test is to see how well the media collection works. Setting up the media collector is fairly straight forward and easy. There are individual settings for each of the different media types, and each type allows you to choose which computers to search. I setup the media collector to start gathering all the media on my network. In the screen shot below you can see how the settings page allows users to select which computers to search.

Once the media collector got started it didn’t take long for it to start copying files, but it didn’t complete for several days. Below is a screen shot of the media collector as it was finding media on my network. As you can see it lists all the computers on the network, the status of each, all the media found, copied, and ignored. Clicking on either of the last three will open a new box that will show the exact files. Seeing the files is great if you want to diagnose a problem, or just see what has been copied so far.

Hp Mediasmart Server Ex495

Next I wanted to see how well the media converter worked. I have a whole bunch of ripped DVDs and I wanted to see if the server could handle converting them into a different format. So I copied about 10 DVDs onto the MediaSmart server, went through the setup screens, and then enabled it. The process of converting DVDs is time consuming, and luckily the MediaSmart server runs this process in the background. I noticed that converting my DVDs takes a couple hours per movie, this is probably because I wanted them converted to both a single file at the highest quality and a mobile version. Also, as the media collector collected movies from my computers, they were automatically added to the queue and converted.

Here is a screenshot of the system status screen while the media converter was running. As you can see, both CPUs were very busy.

The only problem I had was getting the converted files off the MediaSmart server. When the converter is done with a video it puts the files to a special folder that users don’t normally have access to. I suppose this is because HP wants you to access them through the streaming feature. This was not good enough for me and fortunately it didn’t take long to figure out how to give myself access to this folder. I also found that .dvr-ms and .wtv files created by Vista and Win 7 Media Center were not converted. I’m not sure why, but hopefully this is something that HP will fix in the future.

Since HP intended the converted movies to be streamed, that would be my next test. Movies, music, and photos can all be streamed through either a networked PC or via the built-in web page. If you are going through the web page I highly recommend that you have the media converter create a mobile version of your movies. A mobile version will be smaller and easier to stream over the web. Either way I tried it, I didn’t have any trouble viewing movies, pictures, or listening to music. The only negative that I experienced was that the audio on the movies was a bit quiet and I had to turn up my speakers. This was probably a side effect of the conversion and since there aren’t any audio conversion settings, I could not do anything on my own. This is clearly something that will have to be addressed by HP.

As I mentioned earlier, the web interface also got a huge overhaul. As you can see, through the web a user has full access to all the features on the MediaSmart server. In my opinion, the most useful features are the media players, but if you need to make changes to the server or do just about anything else, it is all available.

Last but not least is the power usage. With the new hardware comes a higher power footprint. Since this server is meant to be kept on 24/7 it will have an impact on your power bill. As you can see, when the server is idle the power usage is about 363 watts. However, when the media collector and converter are running the power usage goes up to about 420. If your power rates are high you will need to take this into consideration.

If the power usage is a concern then there is an option to have the server sleep during a block of time. This is great if nobody will be home for several hours every day. Unfortunately, there isn’t an option to sleep at different times on different days, so because I don’t work on the weekends I would have to remember to turn off the sleep option so it is available if I want to watch a movie or listen to music.

Support and Warranty

The HP MediaSmart EX495 comes with a one-year limited warranty, with dedicated technical support from date of purchase via self-help, on-line documentation or phone. As far as I could tell the warranty cannot be upgraded. This is a rather short warranty and since it cannot be upgraded this is a big negative.

However, if something does go wrong with the software, there is a really big Windows Home Server community that is great for help. HP also included a software restore disk if the Home Server software fails. If however, it is the hardware that fails you will be required to do your own support to find out what is wrong and then replace it. Hopefully it is not the motherboard, because it is custom from HP and I doubt you could find a replacement.

Conclusion

The improvement that HP has made are substantial and worthwhile. Fortunately for those that have older MediaSmart Servers, HP has made the new software available to all. Unfortunately, on the older hardware the new functionality probably won’t be as smooth.

If you don’t already have a Windows Home Server, then the MediaSmart server is something you should seriously consider. It has a lot of functionality that really makes it attractive to computer users of all kinds. The retail price of $649 price ($631 at Amazon) might seem a bit steep if all you are doing is comparing it to a NAS, but when you consider everything else it does, the price is quite reasonable. Aside from the short warranty, the HP MediaSmart EX495 is the best implementation of Windows Home Server that I have seen.

Hp Ex470 Software