I have been shopping for a Home Server type product for a while, I considered the Linksys product and Drobo, but ultimately I decided on the HP Media Smart Server. There have been so many positive reviews, on this site, by press and reviewers that I decided this was the way to go. I don’t think any other product has been so widely and positively reviewed, I have not been disappointed.
HP seems to have really invested significant effort to add real value on top of the already pretty good Windows Home Sever Platform. I bought this box primarily for Backup and video streaming to my X-Box, but HP’s remote video and music streaming to my iPhone and being able to access and play all my music on a really nice web interface from home, at work and when I’m traveling have really exceeded my expectations. I’m not sure if people realize that most of these features are HP exclusives. My previous experience indicates some of these product s are more like Beta experiments, HP has really put some time into making this product work out of the box. I also have read that HP’s customer support is great, So far no need since this server has been running 24 by 7 for 6 weeks on two PC’s and a MAC, no issues. It’s pretty obvious I’m a happy customer, I don’t normally right this type of article, but this has been about the best tech purchase I have made in a long time, nice work HP!
MAC Support: I also like the MAC support, not sure why others NAS type product’s don’t offer Time Machine backup Support for MAC. HP did a nice job making this easy to set up use, also makes file sharing between my PC’s and MAC laptop a breeze. When I pull my iPhone out and play DVD’s or my music collection, streaming from my home, that’s pretty cool too.
DVD Support; HP treats unprotected DVD’s as if they were video’s, transcodes them into MP4 files for easy streaming to my X-box and iPhone. Some video programs have more features, but I didn’t even know HP had this feature, works in the background and converts my video, pretty cool.
Media Collector: HP searches the PC’s in your house and moves all Photo’s, Music and Video to the Server so it can be streamed and accessed remotely automatically. Works well.
There are a few more features I have not gotten to, like Photo publishing and on-line Photo album, hopefully these are useful also. Looking forward to what HP adds next.
If I had one concern it would be cost, I wish I could have gotten something this reliably and easy to use for less than $499, after a lot of reading, and now 6 weeks of use, I’m convinced this was the right choice.
Happy Customer.