HP MediaSmart Server EX490 [printer-friendly] • reghardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.com/2010/07/22/review_nas_hp_mediasmart_server_ex490/

HP MediaSmart Server EX490

Home backup goes large

22nd July 2010 12:02 GMT

Review Beyond the entry level market for NAS (network attached storage) there is the kind of buyer who has big server requirements within a small operation, and thinks they might get a great deal bigger later on. That's who HP's MediaSmart Server EX490 is aimed at.

HP's MediaSmart Server EX490: looks like a hi-fi speaker, but much quieter

Except that it's a curious market segment: these buyers might be running a small business with multiple computers, or they might be domestic users who want something to maintain their rapidly expanding media library and drive their home entertainment setup. To its credit, HP has created a product that should satisfy both types of buyer without sacrificing power or ease of use.

The MediaSmart Server EX490 stands 24.8cm tall, 14cm wide and 25.1cm deep, encased tastefully in black with a cage-like metal grill mesh at the front and rear. Four bar-shaped lamps indicate the presence of hard drives inside, although only the bottom one is lit. The front swings open on hinges like a door to reveal four 5.25in hard drive bays in a stack, the bottom one being filled with a 1TB drive.

The idea is that, as your storage demands increase, you can simply add more SATA drives one by one. The unit allows hot swapping so you don't have to shut down the server entirely in order to add or remove a drive. Each bay is accessed by swinging out a handle and pulling out a tray in which the drive sits. To fit a new drive in an empty bay, you would pull out its tray, snap the drive into it (no screws required), then slot the tray back in until it locks. It couldn't be much simpler.

Unlike other multi-bay NAS products, the MediaSmart Server EX490 does not support conventional RAID options. However, you can set up what HP calls 'disk duplication' between pairs which works similarly to a RAID 1 array: if one of the disks fails, its duplicate continues to operate without interruption. For this, you will need two or four identical drives, and the duplication means you can only make use of half their total capacity.

Hot swappable drives

Further storage devices can be added externally, either to expand server capacity or to back up the server content. To this end, one eSATA port and three USB 2.0 ports are fitted at the rear of the unit, and there is a fourth USB 2.0 port accessible at the front. For even more expansion, you can connect a SATA port multiplier rather than an eSATA drive directly. These are pretty good storage expansion options for such an affordable little product.

The server is connected to your network using Gigabit Ethernet. Installing and configuring the MediaSmart Server EX490 is a bit of a challenge and takes a long time. A Windows computer is mandatory for the initial setup because it involves installing Microsoft Windows Home Server - Mac users take note. Once this has been done, you can add Windows and Mac clients without restriction.

Windows Home Server is useful and yet strangely unhelpful when problems arise
Click for a larger image [1]

That said, after completing this review, I reset the server and tried to configure it from scratch using an iMac running Windows 7 64-bit in Boot Camp. It worked perfectly, but I stress that HP does not officially support it.

Full marks to HP for providing a practical, screenshot-filled, 331-page user guide (as a PDF), without which most buyers would be completely lost. It even explains how to reconfigure a variety of third-party firewalls, antivirus programs and routers if things aren't working as they should. I honestly can't praise HP highly enough for taking the trouble of this: most other NAS manufacturers leave you with a black-and-white 24-page leaflet written in Japlish.

HP explains in its guide in great depth how you can maintain libraries of photos, music and video files on the server so that they can be accessed from any computer on the network or served up to home entertainment media players. This was so easy, it practically configured itself and I was able to watch movies through my Playstation 3 (delivered by WiFi across my wireless router) within a few minutes.

The server can be accessed from any of your computers using a web browser.

Getting the on-line delivery features to work was more difficult, and it took me some time to configure connections to Facebook, Flickr and so on. Setting up remote access – that is, accessing the server from anywhere on the Internet – was a complete nightmare using Windows Home Server, but I got there in the end.

That's more than can be said for the much-trumpeted ability to access the server from an Apple iPhone using HP's custom app, which I duly installed from the App Store. Nothing I could do would get this feature to work, despite painstakingly reconfiguring the server, my iPhone, my broadband modem and my router. That's six hours of my life that I'll never get back.

Why put it on your desk? Because it runs quietly.

Despite all the media file management, the best thing about the MediaSmart Server EX490 is its powerful support for network backup. Once set up, user connections to their shares were rock-solid (some other NAS products can be flaky in this respect) and the backups ran very reliably and bloody fast too. I had Windows and Macs on the same network happily triggering automated backups in the background using Windows Home Server Backup and Time Machine respectively, and the individual file restore functions worked correctly.

Verdict

This is a solid and reliable product, my iPhone debacle put aside, that is well-featured and performs admirably. It is not the cheapest four-bay NAS product on the market, though, and it is a long way from being the most affordable 1TB media server. Home entertainment enthusiasts ought to be able to get their kicks for less elsewhere. But for small businesses, or indeed home-based businesses that need to combine media functions, £399 for an expandable HP-branded server strikes me as terrific value for money. ®