HP EX475 MediaSmart Home Server (AMD Live, Windows Home Server, 1 TB Hard Drive)

by HP

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 9.2 x 5.5 inches ; 10 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 17.6 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000UXZUZC
• Item model number: EX475
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (134 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 9, 2007

Product Description

Model: EX475

Amazon.com Product Description

Maximize the power and potential of your home network with the HP EX475 MediaSmart Server, which enables you to conveniently centralize your files and access them from multiple PCs in your home. Based on AMD Live processing power, the MediaSmart Server enables you to back up your home's PCs as well as share and enjoy digital music, home videos and photos from any computer or entertainment system on a home network. The server also has the expandability to grow with your family's changing needs.

The stylish HP MediaSmart Server easily fits into your living room or office decor.

Its small size will fit on top of even the most crowded desk, and it offers wireless access when connected to a Wi-Fi router (via the Gigabit Ethernet port).

This sleek, streamlined micro-tower design is perfect for use in the home office or the living room, and its perforated steel exterior panels provide cool, quiet operation. The EX475 MediaSmart Server features 1 TB of capacity (2x500 GB drives, SATA, 7200 RPM), 512 MB of installed DDR2 RAM, four hard drive bays for additional expansion using off-the-shelf SATA I or II hard drives, a Gigabit Ethernet port for ultra-fast networking (and connection to a wireless router), four USB 2.0 ports (1 on the front, 3 on the back) for connecting to additional hard drives, and an and an eSATA port for high-speed data transfer to external storage devices--up to 6 times faster than existing solutions.

It's quick and easy to set up your HP MediaSmart Server and create up to 10 user accounts using the Microsoft Windows Home Server software. You can also open a predefined Guest account for additional file sharing capabilities. The HP MediaSmart Server also lets you set up your own secure personal web address to allow file access by remote users.

Easily Enhance Your Network

Expand your storage possibilities with the MediaServer's four hard drive bays.

Every PC on your network will have the Control Center software, giving users the ability to browse shared folders on the HP MediaSmart Server, add photos to the HP Photo Webshare and perform an immediate backup of their computer. Set the access privileges for each user at the shared-folder level to allow Read/Write, Read Only or No Access. You also control the remote access privilege for each user. Approved users will then be able to remotely access shared files and even applications on their home PC through a secure connection from any Internet-connected PC.

AMD LIVE Smarter Digital Entertainment

Share Your Media
Use included HP Photo Webshare software to easily and securely share photos stored on your HP MediaSmart Server with select friends and family. A quick link to Snapfish allows easy photo printing. Enjoy digital music, photos, video and files from any networked PC. Stream content directly to your home entertainment center using a digital media adapter (DMA). The DMA device accesses the media files and coordinates the streaming process between the HP MediaSmart Server and your entertainment device.

Protect Your Data
Keep your PC files safe with automatic backup for multiple PCs. You can customize the frequency of backups and how many backups are stored. Files accidentally deleted can be easily found on the backup image and copied to your PC. In the event of hard drive failure, the included HP PC Restore disc is all you need to return your PC and all your data to their original condition.

Other Features

• Centralize your iTunes music libraries and playlists on the server for playback to any PC or notebook running iTunes on your home network.
• Incremental backups: After initial backup, only changes are backed up.
• Efficient single copy backup: A single copy of each file is backed up, no matter how many computers that files resides on in your home network.
• Add an internal or external hard drive to the HP MediaSmart Server, indicate that you want to add the disk in the Windows Home Server Console, and the HP MediaSmart Server storage grows. No need to power down the unit or manage drive letters for multiple hard drives.
• Remote access compatibility: Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Media Center Edition 2004 or higher, or Windows Vista Ultimate or higher
• File sharing compatibility: Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows XP Home or Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Professional SP4, Mac, OS X, Linux.
• Backup compatibility: Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows XP

What's in the Box
HP MediaSmart Server, power cord, Ethernet cable, software installation disc, PC restore disc, server recovery disc, Quick Start and HP support guides.

Important: The HP MediaSmart Server is not a stand-alone computer. You connect it to your networked computer system. No monitor is needed because its user interface is accessed from another computer.

Product Description

HP EX475 1TB Mediasmart Home Server. Multiple PCs in your home often means photos, music, videos and files scattered about and difficult to locate. The HP MediaSmart Server provides a central location to keep all your files for easy access. Centralize and share your files and media across your home network. Remotely access files on your server and run applications on your home PCs from any internet connected computer. Stream photos, music and videos to PCs on your network or to your TV or stereo system. With HP Photo Webshare, however, you can quickly and automatically create a photo website on your server and share photos and video clips with only the friends and family you designate. Easily setup a personal web address that visitors can use to see photos on your webshare. Set up automatic emails to notify friends and family to share different photo albums. Visitors can upload their own photos for sharing and download full resolution photos or be linked to Snapfish for photo printing. As you accumulate increasing amounts of digital content, keeping everything protected becomes a time consuming task. The HP MediaSmart Server takes the worry out of data protection by automatically backing up all of your important media and other files. Gain peace of mind through easy backup of household PCs and notebooks running Windows XP and later operating systems. Designate folders that will be copied automatically onto multiple hard drives for an additional layer of redundant protection. Restore individual files or an entire PC hard drive in the event of a hardware or software failure. Four internal hard drive bays, four USB 2.0 ports and one eSATA port for storage expandability. Easily expand capacity with off the shelf SATA drives installation doesnt require tools or cables.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

203 of 208 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Microsoft should be proud of their work, and a pretty HP box too!, November 27, 2007

By 

J. Stillman "tech guy" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: HP EX470 MediaSmart Home Server (AMD Live, Windows Home Server, 500 GB Hard Drive) (Personal Computers)

*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.

56 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Just TOO cool!, November 29, 2007

By 

Tomcat_STL (St. Louis, Missouri United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP EX475 MediaSmart Home Server (AMD Live, Windows Home Server, 1 TB Hard Drive) (Personal Computers)

I pre-ordered after figuring out I could not put together as nice of a box for twice the price. Good Call!

This is really close to a perfect product right out of the chute. The difficulties I ran into mostly had to do with some complicated PC configurations I have. If you are moderately comfortable with your operating system then you probably won't have too much trouble. I wouldn't dump it in a novice's lap, though.

Couple of quick tips...

1. Don't run more than 1 anti-virus/spyware/security package on your pc. This caused some difficult complications for me.
2. Before you install the server allow your PC's firewall to forward all IP traffic from your local network. This will allow the installer to find the server and do its thing without any blocking.
3. Check your services and make sure Volume Shadow Copy and COM+ are enabled and set to Auto.
4. It seems best to setup all your pcs with the same user names and strong passwords. The MediaSmart doesn't organize things by name but rather identifies each PC individually. This REALLY simplifies things!

Using a Remote Desktop Connection you can access the underlying WHS operating system. I set mine up with a static IP and changed the Workgroup to match the rest of my LAN. Also, I checked the performance and everything is cool even during a backup with a remote connection. I also plugged in my LaserJet 1300 and used WHS to add the printer for sharing. This didn't go well until I went to device manager and updated the printer driver from there. Then it was like butter and the printing speed is super quick.

I considered upgrading to 1GB of ram, but it seems really unnecessary. If you'd like to... Kingston #KVR667D2N5/1G has worked for another - it's PC2 5300, fyi. Messing around in WHS is at your own risk, of course! But my gigabit network is fast and server discovery is bullet fast. I use a Netgear GS108 ProSafe switch and Cat6 cables. iTunes sharing is awesome, too.

I connected from work through a large corporate network and it worked like a charm, fyi.

I loaded it up to a total of 2.5TB but that may be overkill. Two wired dual-boot PC's and a wireless connection comprise my home network. The router is a Buffalo WHR-G54S firmware flashed with dd-WRT. The server auto-configured the unit flawlessly. It is amazing how the backup operation conserves space amongst multiple PC's.

Nice Job MS, HP and Amazon!!!

67 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-have for multi-PC families, November 26, 2007

By 

Cruzer - See all my reviews

This review is from: HP EX475 MediaSmart Home Server (AMD Live, Windows Home Server, 1 TB Hard Drive) (Personal Computers)

"You need a what? Why do we NEED a home server?" is what my wife asked incredulously when I told her I had to have the EX470 MediaSmart Home Server. If you're like our family, you have more than 2 PCs (we have 6 PCs, 1 media center, 2 XBOXs, and 2 MP3 players) and your music, photos, and multi-media are spread throughout the network. You also have never done a single backup of any of the PCs in your house and you're one hard-drive failure from losing those precious moments.

The HP MediaSmart Home Server, based on Microsoft's Home Server Edition is not your plain-vanilla backup drive. Instead it has some killer features:

- Speedy, intuitive setup in a great looking machine (took me literally 10 minutes to setup)
- Automatic backup with optional folder duplication
- Hot-pluggable storage allows you to expand storage up to 16 terabytes on the fly (we have 1 terabyte)
- Login remotely and upload/download files from anywhere
- Access other computers on your network remotely (like Go-to-My-PC)
- File/media serving and print serving (centralize your media and access it from any device)
- Setup a domain in a few clicks so you can share your folders with friends and family over the web
- Monitor all your PCs for security...you will get alerts if antivirus or the firewall aren't working
- Extensible "Add-ins" allow developers to build and offer (usually freeware) some cool features like remote management, mobile access, and dozens of other custom applications
- You can also sign-up for internet storage and backup your Home Server automatically (for additional safety) to offsite providers for as little as $5/month for unlimited storage

Overall, I consider the Home Server to be a breakthrough in home technology. There's no other backup drive or NAS on the market that offers the breadth of features or extensibility, in a centralized and automated fashion (for those lazy home administrators). I am really happy with this purchase and particularly happy that all of our family pictures are finally safe from hard-drive failure. I heartily recommend the MediaSmart Home Server.

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