Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 69
 Works as expected... July 26, 2010
sduel (Northborough, MA USA)
This is a decent piece of equipment. The unit is surprisingly small but very solid. Added a second 1.5TB drive within a minute.
Setup was a different story. I have 2 laptops running Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium. With the first one I ran into problems with the connector software that gets installed on the client. Some version incompatibility that somehow resolved itself after reinstalling the client software and rebooting the laptop and server multiple times. The second one was a lot more trouble. For whatever reason it would not log into the server, telling me the password is incorrect. After hours of research I found that I had to add a registry key to set a certain network setting. This can be done through Windows Admin Tools if you have the Ultimate edition but needs to be done manually in the registry with the Home edition. Big waste of time. Not sure why Microsoft hasn't put out a patch for this. Seems to have been an issue with Home Server for a few years now.
Other than the setup issues the server works as expected. Good user interface, media collector, iTunes server and backups run without issues. The web access option to the server is also a nice option.
Once setup, it works like a charm.
 Worked Great Until it died 1 Week later. July 17, 2010
R. Meincke (Denver)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For the few days that it did work I found the MediaSmart Server to be a really nice system. Physically the system is much smaller than the product pictures lead me to believe. Which was nice because you could set it up somewhere without taking up too much space. The four drive bays with pull out trays make it easy to install additional hard drives. It also comes with four usb ports and a eSata port so you can dangle a bunch of external drives off of it if really need the extra storage that badly. It runs quietly and doesn't require much in the way of physical attention. So you can pretty much so set it up anywhere without having to worry about having to access it all the time. Setting the server up is pretty easy just plug it in to your network and run the included setup disc on the computer you wish to have connected to the server.
Windows Home Server is a nice operating system. I didn't get to use all the features on it before my server died but the system worked great as a file server. Shared folders get set up automatically when you run the setup disc on your PC. Managing which users can access different folders is easy and straight forward. The automatic backup feature works as advertised and is easy to setup. Everything can be managed from the console that gets installed when you run the setup disc or you can access the server using remote desktop and manage things directly from the servers desktop. Unless you're an advanced user I'd recommend sticking with the console since it's designed to be the primary tool for managing your server.
Unfortunately I have to give this system 1 star. Not just because it died on me. I realize that sometimes you get a faulty product and I'm not too upset about that. I'm giving this one star because HP uses a proprietary power supply on this server that you cannot buy anywhere. I'm lucky this happened to me within the time frame that I can still return this product for a refund. If your servers power supply dies sometime after the return period and one year warranty, you're stuck with a useless box that you can't repair yourself. And from what I've read from other peoples experience HP doesn't offer any after market support so you can't even pay them to fix your server.
Good Product - Comments on Restoring a PC July 12, 2010
Chuck Gritton
I bought the EX495 over 6 months ago. It has worked well for me but I wanted to report on several things that might help others.
My first challenge is that there is no official documentation on how to provide UPS to the EX495. I even asked HP support about this and they encouraged me NOT to try. But I disregarded that advice since my main purpose for the machine in the first place was back-up. :-) Anyway, I searched online and found a very nice program (free) from gridjunction [...]. I just followed their instructions with a supported APC UPS and a USB cable. It has worked wonderfully with no issues at all since then.
My second challenge just happened. I had been backing up my collection of laptops and one of them - my wife's - totally crashed during an attempted iPhone sync (not sure if that was the real cause by the way). Anyway, the crash was so bad that the Windows Restore function didn't work at all and there were no useful on-computer restore points either. So I had to rely on a full disk restore from the EX495.
Well, fortunately I had a backup from just a few days prior! My second challenge was to locate the PC Restore CD they give you. I did that and inserted it eager to see how this thing worked. The first challenge was to set the BIOS to boot from CD instead of the hard drive. That wasn't too bad. Then I went through the wizard and hit a snag - even though I was a few feet away from the server and router and directly wired to one of the router ports, the wizard couldn't find the server! I kept trying to type and retype the server name in various forms but no luck. It just didn't see it. Bummer...
So I called tech support and after a few preliminaries, I got the answer. My laptop was 64-bit Windows 7 but the Windows version on the PC Restore was a 32-bit Vista. So to make it work, I needed to load up a 32-bit Vista networking driver for my laptop. The procedure is a bit cumbersome but it worked. On a good PC, you go to the site for your laptop (mine was HP) and you find a Vista 32-bit driver to support the Ethernet chip on your laptop or PC. Mine was in a .exe file. So then you need to unzip it to get the collection of folders contained in it. (The free program 7-Zip did this fine for me.) You then copy those folders onto a USB drive. Then at the screen on the PC Restore program where it shows you the devices it found and gives you the option to add more via a USB drive, do that with the USB drive you just used. It will overwrite your normal networking 64-bit driver with the 32-bit one temporarily. After that, in my case at least, it will find the server and you're off to a full disk restore.
My restore by the way took nearly 4 hours to complete but worked flawlessly. While the restore process could have been a bit more automated - or at least better documented -- it did work and I'm quite happy. Without it, it would have been alot more painful to restore that laptop.
 Best WHS box for the price. July 7, 2010
Odd Ball (Inland empire, CA)
Bought my EX490 a while back and has been a good little server. It resides on my multiplatform lan setup. I am currently running various versions of windows from 98SE to 7 and various implementations of Linux (mostly debian) and Mac leopard and snow leopard. I have software to backup images of every machine and use the native backup capabilities of WHS and also Time Machine for the Macs (handy when I upgraded the hard drive on my mac mini - note - all you need is 1 restore disc for all the macs). Recent modifications to the EX490 other than adding hard drives, are upgrading CPU to Core2Duo and special cable for connecting KVM. Guess I was trying to make it Vail compatible but I am pretty happy now with the way it is. Besides, I now have a 20 TByte HP 2008 server that I use to backup my WHS server. Thank God for Gb Ethernet.
pleased with the product July 2, 2010
rich
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Just got this product and it has helped me to organise my pictures and music and get them off my computer but still have access to them. I am still getting use to it but so far I like it.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 69
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