Customer reviews from hp.com
HP - 1TB MediaSmart Server
Average customer rating
5
(1 Review)
Rating breakdown 1 review
5 Stars
1
4 Stars
0
3 Stars
0
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1 Star
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100%of customers recommend this product.
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Customer Reviews for HP - 1TB MediaSmart Server
Customer Rating
5
EX490 - I love it
on February 11, 2010
Posted by: CyberWerx
Gender:Male
I purchased the EX490 for one reason only ... fully automated backup of workstations and servers which I use in my consultancy business. They range from XP (32/64), Vista (32/64), W7 (32/64) and W2K3 Server (32/64) and W2K8 (32/64). This works out perfectly for the 10 user license that ships with WHS.
I am not using any of the media features so I cannot comment in that area.
Having worked with HP Proliant Servers for much of my career I have come to expect certain things from HP: (1) The equipment does what HP says it will do "out of the box", (2) Ease of setup and maintenance and (3) Update support via their web services.The EX490 impressed me in every category.
The one thing I was not expecting was what I can only describe as "blistering" PC backup speeds over my Gigabit Network which uses an HP Procurve 2510G-48 10/100/1000 managed switch. The only down-side is that it is so fast it “burns a hole” in your network bandwidth and nothing else is going to get through whilst the backups are running. Not a problem if you schedule them for the wee hours of the morning when nobody is using the network.
I also like the “wake-up” feature of the backup software which will wake up a PC if it is powered down to perform the backup and then shutting the PC down again when the backup is completed … very nice. You need to enable the Wake On LAN function in your PC BIOS to use this feature.
I have also tested the PC recovery and the Server Recovery processes including replacement of the system drive. Again HP did not disappoint ... it all just worked "as advertised".
For the techno-freaks (like me) who just can’t leave things alone Windows Home Server is Windows 2003 Server with most of the features intact. Whilst you MUST manage the core functionality of the Home Server through the console provided you also have full Admin access through Remote Desktop and can do pretty much what you like. This comes with the caveat that you can damage the functionality of the Home Server if you are not careful. I think the critical rule is manage the disks and user accounts from the WHS console.
I have installed SQL 2005 Express without any issues and have re-configured the IIS services for use in my software development environment which uses Visual Studio.
The only thing “missing” IMHO is a WINS server for the home network but that is a minor point which hopefully HP and Microsoft will address in future releases of WHS.
I would recommend this to a friend!
Written by a customer while visiting hp.com
