*EDIT 7/7/08* Power Pack 1 has fixed all of my issues with this server - and I would give it a 5 star review but Amazon will not allow me to change the rating.
First, I am programmer that works from home, with some expertise in setting up a usable home network. This little box allows me to remote in when i am on the road, replace a few NAS drives, simplify backup, AND share music and photos. There's only one REAL BIG complaint that I have, and that's working with 64 bit systems. I will go into that...
I added 3 1TB drives to this in minutes without shutting the system down. The drive sleds are very innovative, as they require no tools to use. You just need to lift a handle, pull out the sled, and place the new HD in using pins that flex to hold the HD in place. You then just put the drive back in its bay and lock the lever/handle in place. Visually, there is a light for each drive that will show you it is ready for use. You must use the WHS console to add the drives to your existing storage, and the light goes from purple to blue - and is ready to use. What is cool here is that your users don't see 4 different drives, but just 1 with all the space as if the existing drive automatically grew. If you want to replace a drive with larger capacity, it is simple as well. You use the console to remove the drive. When you remove a drive, WHS will copy the data off of that drive to the others (if they have room to do so) and then tell you when it is safe to dismount it.
Before this, I was using 4 seats of gotomypc professional for just under $600. 3 for my machines, and 1 for my wife's. I got the pro level because I wanted to administer all of the boxes centrally. My wife is definately not as technical as I am, but she needs access to her files from work and home (she works in higher ed, and is also working on her master's). Using the network shares and the web interface, she no longer has to rely on her laptop being on with gotomypc running. She can still remote in if her laptop is on, but she now can get the files she needs, and edit them at work. And send them back so she has the most up to date at all times. I am keeping 1 account of gotomypc active, because you cannot remote into a 64 bit OS from the web interface at this time. But the cost savings here almost pay for this alone!
I have three NAS drives, and two of them are going away as obsolete. I mainly used them for backup using Retrospect. I still am keeping Retrospect for my Windows x64 boxes and my linux clients, as the backup doesn't support 64 bit OS's at this time. I am backing up to the WHS thru Retrospect, and it is being backed up to the other NAS. The WHS allows you to duplicate shares to multiple drives, so this is in a since like having 3 backups of the data. For the 32 bit Windows clients, this backup is near perfection. It's mindlessly simple to set up, and it keeps multiple backups and automatically disposes of the older ones if you need the space. The mindless backup for 32 bit clients is easily paying for the rest of the cost of this box.
So for 64 bit users, this may not quite be for you just yet. Microsoft has stated that they are working on the 64 bit client for WHS, but gives no release date. As soon as they get this, it will serve my needs much better. Both remoting and backup can be solved for 64bit OSs if you have the know-how, so it's not as terrible as some might make it, but is annoying enough that I deducted 1 star for each.
The sharing functionality for music/video is really nice. Two of the pre-existing shares are called "music", and "video" and if you have a media center extender/XBOX360, it will show up there as a media center with whatever playable content you happen to put there. It won't magically allow you to play iTunes AACs, but any format that your media center could play, it will work. If you do have iTunes - it may add more value because you can have the system create a music database from ALL of the iTunes user's machines. I use iTunes and so does my wife, but this won't work for us because I'd like to be able to use the music directory directly available to iTunes for each of us, so that we both share the same song list, and if she buys a song, then it shows up in my iTunes library and I can make a playlist with that song in it. This is *almost* how it works with the iTunes sharing here. I can see a shared system named "HP MediaSmart Server" but you can't copy the songs locally, and you can't edit the playlists it contains. Kind of a bummer, but it may work for you.
The photosharing web application is a nice idea. You can make albums using photos from your machine - but suprisingly you can't just pick from the "photos" share on the drive. So if you want to do that - you must map a drive to the "photos" share and choose them that way. Not very efficient to copy from the network instead of directly from the disk! You can then create a list of people to share the album with, and send out a message to look at your album. You can choose existing users you've set up for remote access, or create a visitor profile. This allows you send it to Grandma and not have to create a "Grandma" user on the server itself. Very nicely done.
Another small caveat is if you use TZO for Dynamic DNS currently. You need to call TZO to get your existing account setup correctly on the box.
Update 3/11/08:
I've had the EX470 for 4 months now, and I am still confident that at this time it warrants a 3 of 5 star review. There is still no connector to Vista Ultimate 64bit. I have not used the photo sharing application because there are just much better options on the internet. I do stream to my XBOX 360 and PS3 - but you can't stream MP4 based video - so this means no M4Vs, no DivX/Xvid. It has no problems streaming MPEG movies, so this is a limitation of both the PS3 and 360.
In terms of add-ins - I have tried a lot of them, but kept 2 - Jungle Disk and LobsterTunes. Jungle Disk uses the Amazon S3 SOAP APIs to back up your home server's share files online. It is slow, but it works and is very cheap to use. It does not backup the WHS OS or local files - just the shares. LobsterTunes exposes my music collection to my smart phone. It does not stream them, but makes a local copy on the device - so make sure you have an unlimited and fast data plan for this. I've used it to pull up obscure music for a friend to sample, and it's a keeper. I have also installed Raxco's PerfectDisk software to keep the drives from becoming overly fragmented.
I have upgraded the memory to two gigabytes as well. This should be the standard in these servers. It made a HUGE difference in throughput and response times from the WHS OS. I have also installed my own SSL certificate because I was sick and tired of seeing the bad certificate message everytime I used the web interface. Most people won't get this problem because they are using the standard windowshomeserver.com domain. Those that use custom domains will know what I mean.
Microsoft had promised a patch due at first in January, then slipped to February, then March. Known as Power Pack 1, it is supposed to add support for 64 bit Windows clients, allow you to back up the OS itself, and other smaller niceties. I wouldn't hold your breath for this patch. The slippage occurred because of a nasty bug in WHS ( google for KB #946676). This bug causes files to get corrupted if you attempt to modify the files directly on the home server. It will only affect WHS boxes that have multiple hard drives for storage. Now, all storage drives on the OS will show as one drive, with WHS constantly monitoring and moving the files around to "balance" the amount of space used on each drive. The problem is that in order to show the shares as a single drive, their contents are mapped and cached in memory. It's basically like a switchboard operator that knows where your files are supposed to be. Most of the time, there is no problems, but the mechanism to update the switchboard operator's lookup is not keeping up with the balancing when there is a lot going on. So instead of getting Klondike 5-3226, now your getting mostly that, but maybe a bit of Klondike 5-3227.
I've only had this happen once, to my wife. She wanted to archive some of her Outlook email, so she created a PST on the server and moved the emails over to the new PST. The corruption occured in the middle of this - and she lost all of the emails that were copying over to the share. This was an easy solve issue, because the WHS backup had run and she only ended up loosing the last 5 emails she received. Now, I have trained her to save locally and copy to the server, and pull down from the server first, modify and repeat. There have been no problems since.
