HP MediaSmart Server EX487 Review

Mike Agerbo shows you how to consolidate and backup your digital media files from all the computers in your network and share them with any device in your network with the HP Mediasmart Server EX487.

I think most of us have our digital media files on a lot of different computers in our home network, be it music, photos or even video. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of them. I always worry about backing up as well. How do I make sure that I have all those systems and all those files in a central back up that I can have access to if anything bad ever happens. Well, a lot of people are looking at home media service now, this is the latest from hp. This is their home media server, their EX47. I got a few different models with different storage sizes, but essentially, this is kind of a computer that you plug right into your router. You don’t plug in a screen or anything like that. It’s got a computer processor in it and it allows you to back up all the computers in your house and also to stream all the content from here to any device that’s hooked to the network. You can see I've got four drive bays. Right now I've got two of them full with hard drives. If I want to add additional ones, super easy. Just take a regular SATA drives, you just plug them in here and stick them in. and it automatically formats it and makes it ready for the home server to be use. That’s the nice thing, it takes all the storage whether its internal hard drives or external ones. You plugged in to the USB or ESATA ports and munch them all into one logical drives. So it’s easy to actually keep things organize. What's kind of cool about this is that it’s expandable, not only internally, but also has four USB ports and an ESATA port. So you could hook up external hard drives as well to really beef this thing up. Setting this thing up, you want to set a little bit of time aside, take a full afternoon to get all the things working. What you want to do is basically set up the connector software that it comes with on a CD on each computer in your house that you want backed up. And to be able to see all the files on the server and its hard drives. And not only does it work with Windows, but it will also work with any Mac, any Apple computers that you have. Although to set it up, you do have to set it up with a Windows machine. Once it’s set up, you got the home server console. Right now, were running it off of this particular computer. But any computer in the network that’s hooked up to it actually brings this up and tweak it. We can see we got a couple drives in the unit right now. We can see that they're healthy. We also get a graphical representation of how much storage space is on there. How much is being use and how much is left. And when we talked about sharing folders, these are all the different types of files and media files were working with. On the left here, you can see that I've got everything from music, photos, recorded TV, videos, I can even start adding ones which I've done here as well like converted videos and home video. And we can also go in and check backups. So for example here, two of the computers in this house is hooked up to this. The one upstairs that were using right now, hasn’t been backed up for 7 days. If we want to, we can do an automatic back up right this second. Got all sorts of great features to. Besides the automatic back up of both Windows and Macintosh based computers, you can also share your media to any network connected to the device. That could be like an Xbox 360 video game console, an Apple TV, a Windows Media Center, or any laptop or PC for that matter. We want to share our photos, what this has got built in photo sharing. We can actually upload all of our photos to a personal private password protected site that our friends and families can access. It’s got a built in server for iTunes, so you can use this to be your iTunes server. So any device in your network in your house, whether that’s a video game console or a computer, Apple TV box for that matter. They can actually stream and get all their songs on this one device. They don’t have to go searching on all the different computers. What I like to is the ability to actually convert videos. A lot of us have the little portable media players now. Whether that’s an iPhone, an iPod, even a PSP. What you can do is tell what folder’s on here. Maybe rip a bunch of your DVDs, it will automatically convert them down to an iPod format for you in the background, you don’t even have to do anything. So that all of your video is ready for you to take on your mobile device whenever you wanted. And if you want to take things to the next level, you even can setup server online backup system as well. So you can even back this up to an online service like the Amazon. It’s called the Media Smart Home Server from hp, it’s their EX47. If you want to consolidate all your digital media files so it’s easy to make sure that they're backed up and to be able to share them to all the devices in your network, you want to have a look at this.