The delivery guy showed up a day earlier than expected with my HP EX470 MediaSmart Home Server. A nice surprise, indeed! Taking it out of the box the first thing you notice is how tiny it is. The proportions are about the same as your typical mini-tower but this baby isn’t even 10 inches tall. Four 3.5″ hotswap bays, 1 USB up front, three in the back, 1 eSATA port, and GigE. Yummy.
Setting it up is a breeze. Plug in Ethernet and power and press the button. Insert the setup CD on your Windows PC, answer a few questions, and you are ready to start copying files and backing up PCs in just a couple of minutes.
The first thing I did was to pop out one of the empty drive trays and slap an extra 250GB drive in. No tools required, unlike the servers at work (don’t get me started on how much I hate SuperMicro drive trays). The new drive immediately showed up in the Server Storage section of the Windows Home Server Console where I simply highlighted it, clicked the Add button, and wham-o, an extra 232.89GB of storage became available. Pretty cool.
Next I configured it to back up my desktop PC. Again, a drop-dead simple process. Click on Computers & Backup, highlight the computer, click Configure Backup. It brought up a list of all the drives on the PC, already preselected, and on the next screen allowed me to configure which directories to exclude from backups. After finishing the wizard I clicked Backup Now to get it started. It chugged away for quite some time checking sectors on F: (why’d it start there?) and now it’s sending data to the server at about 230Mb/s. Sweet.
The Web Site Settings are something of an enigma. I get to choose between “HP MediaSmart Server Home Page”, “HP MediaSmart Server Webshare”, “Windows Home Server Home Page”, and “Windows Home Server Remote Access” as the Web Site Home Page. There’s nothing to in the help file to indicate what any of those things mean. Guess I’ll have to RTFM.
There’s also some Media Sharing stuff that supports music, photos, and videos. Presumably it’s the same media sharing as WMP10, which means it should support Xbox 360s and other uPnP A/V devices. There’s a separate iTunes Server. And “Photo Webshare.” None of that is terribly interesting to me.
One thing I’m not loving is that HP is supporting the proliferation of blue LEDs. Blue LEDs are pure evil and if there was was some way for me to earn a living from beating the crap out of every person that decided to put a blue LED into a piece of consumer electronics, I would consider myself to have the best job in the world. But I digress. Thankfully HP put a slider to control the brightness in the Windows Home Server Console and at the lowest setting it turns all of them off except for the power LED. Seeing that feature almost makes me want to hug someone.
To fill up the rest of the internal bays I’ve ordered a pair of Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB drives from NewEgg (on sale for $159 right now). Not counting the 250GB drive I already had lying around, I’ll have a a 2TB storage server for about $0.48/GB. By way of comparison, a diskless Netgear (Infrant) ReadyNAS NV+ plus 2 x 750GB and 1 x 500GB would be about $0.61/GB.
It doesn’t quite feel right to call the MediaSmart a bargain, especially considering that it’s little more than a very low-end PC in a compact case, but… For what it does, and for what competitors like the ReadyNAS and TeraStation sell for, the MediaSmart is a damned good deal. I’ll be buying another one just as soon as someone releases an add-on to sync shares and backups across the Internets!
