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For media, it's fantastic to have my movies, music and photos centralized in a reasonably safe place. It also will automatically check your iTunes collection, and add new songs, if you can't be bothered to organize your music manually to the server.For Macs, you can mount the server shares as separate drives and save to them just as easily as any other drive on your Mac.
This is a great entry point if you want to make your home digital media centric.Hope this helps. but the user community is large and helpful via many forums - you can find workarounds.
Most of the PC functions are not available to the Mac (auto backup, etc). Later models of the server (EX485/7), do a somewhat better job of integrating with Macs than this model and the processor and memory are more appropriate for digital media serving on a large scale in the home.You'll probably want to upgrade the memory for this server as soon as you can - dealt with in the user community forums/blogs very well.However, I can't really say enough good things about the server, but it is important to note that many of the negative reviews regarding the server deal with issues that have been resolved within the past year.
I bought this server on sale about two months ago and have not been disappointed with its basic functionality.For PCs, it has worked flawlessly as an image backup server. Additionally, the server is VERY expandable (storage size), which is a distinct advantage over the second gen which does not support eSATA port multiplication (recognizing multiple drives on one port).
The console is available by web browser.
So.DO NOT BUY THIS SERVER.not only is it prone to failure, you cannot get it fixed. I now own a $700.00 paperweight. My HP EX475 MediaSmart Server developed a loud noise after only 15 months. I was suprised to discover that HP DOES NOT OFFER POST WARRANTY SERVICE SUPPORT & DOES NOT PROVIDE PARTS FOR REPAIR. HP does not mention in their sales literature that it does not offer out of warranty service and it does not tell you that it will not sell repair parts to other service vendors.
I would definitely recommend this product. I didn't put me on hold, they knew what they were doing and they were patient with me as we went through checking connections and modifying files. It took 3 calls to HP to get everything working properly but my experience with the HP technical support was outstanding. It is also nice having access to all my files over the internet. First I have to say the Mediasmart Server did not work with my system out of the box. I have two desktop computers, a laptop, a xbox 360 and a Zune all connected to it. Once set up it has worked perfectly and has helped centralize all my media and files and make sure everything is backed up.
Xbox native media player can get to the content fine, but for Media Center Extender to see it takes a little more magic.I did the memory upgrade and it was pretty straight forward with instructions found on the internet. I still haven't found the perfect solution to one music library for all my devices. For the more tech savvy folks, there seem to be lots of ways to get under the covers and extend the functionality to do more. If only I could come up with a cleaner way to let my Xbox 360 MCE access the music library without reliance on my Vista box, it would be perfect. I think the Home Server does what it does quite well. Easy to use and set-up to do the basics. This is very close.
running four 500g Hard drives and 1 terabyte eSATA drive. interface is slow but I will upgrade that here soon. Easy to setup and I got it to work very easiy. It work s flawlessly.
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