![]() ![]() I’ll be honest, I don’t usually give too much thought to the packaging of electronic products as long as they arrive safe and sound from their journey to my home (except for the atrocious plastic clamshell packaging). Do keep in mind that you’ll need to manually enable Duplication on all your shared folders that you wish to protect when you add an additional hard drive down the road. In the end, I believe more customers will be pleased with the option to purchase a server with a more powerful CPU and increased storage than customers who would prefer a 2 drive model. ![]() ![]() The other perspective is that there are a set of customers who want duplication enabled out of the box, they trust HP to provide the right solution, and are willing to pay a small premium in order to have that confidence. On the one hand many customers didn’t want the 2 drive models due to the package cost often being higher than the additional cost of a user purchasing a drive. ![]() I’ve got mixed feelings about the loss of the 2 hard drive SKU from the server lineup. The EX490 keeps in line with the previous generations of servers, providing solid performance with reduced power consumption and a lower price point, yet still providing the same expandability to ensure your server continues to meet your storage needs for a long time. My view on this change is that HP built the EX495 to meet the needs of customers that want a powerful processor and plenty of storage to really provide a high performance server solution. Here’s a full table of the specifications as provided by HP.ĭepth: 23cm (base) – 25cm (top) (9.2″-9.5″) The EX495 model comes with an Intel Pentium 2.5GHz Dual Core processor, a single 1.5TB hard drive, and will retail for $699. The EX490 model comes with an Intel Celeron 2.2GHz processor, a single 1.0TB hard drive, and will retail for $549. Both feature Intel processors that are faster than previous servers, 2GB of DDR2 RAM, and more storage capacity. With the new EX490 and EX495, HP has made the change to more broadly differentiate the two models. The lower cost model contained a single hard drive while the more expensive model contained two hard drives in order to allow duplication to be enabled so that files are protected in the event of a hard drive failure. In previous generations of the MediaSmart Server there were two possible configurations that the customer could purchase. The focus of this review will be on the HP MediaSmart Server, if you’re not familiar with Windows Home Server I suggest you start here and then visit our forums to ask any specific questions you might have. I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent the last couple of weeks using and evaluating the EX495 model running the new 3.0 version of the MediaSmart Server software, and I’m ready to give you a tour of what you can expect from the new MediaSmart Server. Today HP is continuing that evolution with the third generation of the EX series and have announced the upcoming release of the MediaSmart Server EX490 and EX495. We’ve seen the evolution from the original EX47x series, to the upgraded hardware and improved software of the EX48x series. While most of these other manufacturers are releasing their first Home Server, HP has two generations of the EX-series as well as the LX195 under their belt, and undeniably the most experience making Windows Home Server based devices. When it does, you'll have to decide whether to pay for more space or switch to Photo Stream.Over the past 10 months or so since HP released the EX485 and EX487 MediaSmart Servers, we’ve seen offerings from many other manufacturers entering the market. If you don't take a lot of pictures, or use iCloud that much, you can keep iCloud Photos on until your 5 GB fills up. Also, it's best to look into getting a backup plan for your Mac, just to ensure everything is safe. You will run into a bit of trouble when it comes time to upgrade, having to move your pictures to a new device manually, so it's not the greatest option. It does a good job of syncing photos between devices as long as you use both devices regularly, your pictures will be backed up on each device you have. If you have multiple devices and take a lot of pictures, Photo Stream is fine to use. It's a much better solution, and it's less of a hassle than My Photo Stream. And If you're really worried about losing your photos, go with this option, as all your photos will be backed up as long as you have your iCloud account. If you're fine with paying $0.99 per month for iCloud's 50 GB tier, use iCloud Photos. ![]()
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