New HP MediaSmart EX490 & 495

[imnotplutonium]

http://www.hp.com/united-states/camp.../#/EXOverview/

What do you guys think? Seems pretty nice, I have heard great things about Windows Home Server. I was looking at the add-ins and they seem to have most of what anyone would want. Twonky Server, torrent client, web server.

I have been doing well with my pretty recent Thecus 4100 pro but it just seems underpowered and slow at times. Granted I am running a Raid 5 on 4 1TB hard drives but it is packing a measly 256MB of ram that isn't "user replaceable"

It has some nice add ons but everything seems to slow it down so I keep most of the modules turned off. Just twonky.

I was thinking about upgrading from the Thecus to this a little bit after it comes out and I can see some user reviews.

[jrivera04]

I like the idea if media serving since I have being doing it for quite a while myself. MS Home Server is really nice. If you have X360 it will work with it perfectly.

Here is a link on buying an older 475 and upgrading with newer hardware.

Hacking The HP EX470/475 MediaSmart Servers

I would still rather build my own. That's just me though.

EDIT: These guys already ripped one apart.
LINK

Here is a link for a refurbed EX475
LINK

[horist]

Originally Posted by imnotplutonium

I have been doing well with my pretty recent Thecus 4100 pro but it just seems underpowered and slow at times. Granted I am running a Raid 5 on 4 1TB hard drives but it is packing a measly 256MB of ram that isn't "user replaceable"

Have you checked out the thecus wiki?
http://www.onbeat.dk/thecus/index.ph..._modifications

According to that you can upgrade to 1 GB. Last weekend I upgraded my Thecus N5200BR Pro to 1GB RAM (from 512MB) and swapped out the CPU for a 2ghz Intel Pentium M processor (old was an Intel 1.5ghz Celeron Mobile processor) ... as well as tweaking the samba settings (I run IMGDUP so that on reboot, my changes are kept)

Noticed significant improvements (CPU was always pegging on heavy transactions before, and it automatically saw the increased RAM and used it all up for file caching)

Though, In my situation it was needed since I am using iSCSI pretty heavily. I don't have any Operating Systems installed on any of my 3 rack servers running ESXi 4 , they are all run off of a dedicated network to the thecus box as iSCSI mounts.

Added on a 1TB eSATA drive last night (sux that I can't add it as a hot spare or expand the RAID to it... I'm sure i probably could at the OS layer, but when I reach the point of needing 5TB of RAID 5 space (only 4 now), it'll be time to buy a new NAS box lol) and am using that to store stuff I don't care about (it's really nice being able to modify /etc/samba/smb.conf to create my own ount points/shares instead of having to use thecus's goofy method)

[SOMShift]

Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly do you guys use these for?

[jrivera04]

It's a way to centrally store data and network machines. Data from other machines can be stored on it and shared. Media (music and movies) can be streamed to from it.

It also has the beauty of RAID (fault prevention). External hard drives are great but it they fail then the data is lost. Since the data is spread over four hard drives the server can lose one hard drive and the data will be ok. Just replace the bad hard drive with a good one.

[imnotplutonium]

Originally Posted by horist

Have you checked out the thecus wiki?
http://www.onbeat.dk/thecus/index.ph..._modifications

According to that you can upgrade to 1 GB. Last weekend I upgraded my Thecus N5200BR Pro to 1GB RAM (from 512MB) and swapped out the CPU for a 2ghz Intel Pentium M processor (old was an Intel 1.5ghz Celeron Mobile processor) ... as well as tweaking the samba settings (I run IMGDUP so that on reboot, my changes are kept)

Noticed significant improvements (CPU was always pegging on heavy transactions before, and it automatically saw the increased RAM and used it all up for file caching)

Though, In my situation it was needed since I am using iSCSI pretty heavily. I don't have any Operating Systems installed on any of my 3 rack servers running ESXi 4 , they are all run off of a dedicated network to the thecus box as iSCSI mounts.

Added on a 1TB eSATA drive last night (sux that I can't add it as a hot spare or expand the RAID to it... I'm sure i probably could at the OS layer, but when I reach the point of needing 5TB of RAID 5 space (only 4 now), it'll be time to buy a new NAS box lol) and am using that to store stuff I don't care about (it's really nice being able to modify /etc/samba/smb.conf to create my own ount points/shares instead of having to use thecus's goofy method)

Yea I did see the wiki but really didn't want to void the warranty. I looked into it pretty heavily actually. I like the box but I do hate the, as you put it, "goofy methods". I def. do not have the experience you do so I might just be selling the box short. It does everything I really need it to I guess really the speed is what kills me. Maybe I'll drop the $ on the ram and see how much of a diff it makes before resorting into a new nas.

I also like new shiny stuff as you guys know all too well The mediasmart has a lot of features I like but I think it might lead me too far in the other direction with little control over the details. I'll have to do some more reading first. I guess one of the selling points for me is that it can already do most of the stuff I had to find 3rd party modules or hacks for out of the box. i.e. Time Machine backups, proper UpnP support, streaming to iPhone <-that one I am very interested in being that I use a laptop and the only other option I have is simplify media which needs my laptop to be on the entire time I am away.

To SOMShift. I use this to backup, no lectures about how raid is not a backup solution please, my files from my laptop and host all of my media. I started collecting all of my music and movies etc. etc. and realized very quick that my laptop hard drive was not sufficient a while ago. First solution is obviously usb external. Well besides the annoying fact of having to always plug it in and have an additional power outlet (mainly laptop annoyances) it too ends up running low on space and you risk losing valuable info from disk failure. With this I can survive one disk out of the 4 failing without losing any data. It also runs on its own and I can have my laptop off and packed up and still be able to see all the media on my 360 or PS3, or any other DLNA or uPnP device. Also it has its own bit-torrent client so you can leave it on a large distro and not worry about having to have your computer on. Though the stock Thecus torrent client is very weak. I guess after reading horist's threads/posts about his NAS boxes I tried it out since I was tired of having several different USB/Firewire drives around. After I got the hang of it I will never be without a NAS in my home again.

[jrivera04]

Here. If you like new shiny stuff then you will LOVE this beast.

WARNING: Some assembly required.

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage