By Philip Churchill on October 23rd, 2009
Win a HP MediaSmart EX490 Server
Photography website PhotoDoto is giving away a HP MediaSmart EX490 Server.
All you need to do is leave a comment to their post explaining how you would use the MediaSmart server, but make sure you do before the competition ends on the 6th November.
More details and the rules are here.
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I would use a 490 backup my home computers and automate my media center 7 system
To me the dream of a media smart server is exactly as the name implies.. to serve my media around the house. I have a few Xbox 360’s that I bought so they are in all the rooms we spend time in. I’d love to use them in conjunction with my PC so we can stream media from one central location to everywhere. This is especially important now that I have a baby and I’d love to set up a play list of his favorite baby einsteins so I don’t have to change out a disk every 1/2 hour.
I would use the EX49 to store all my media and share it with my computers and TV at home and with my friends outside.
i’d use a new MSS server to stream videos around the house and automatically backup the files (videos, pictures, documents) from my wife and my laptops and desktops. the peace of mind would be heavenly!
My older sister is always taking pictures of her 5 year old daughter (my niece) and never posting the pictures. I’m lucky to see even a handful at Christmas. Despite several warnings and few close calls, she also never backs any of them up. I would love for her to have a dedicated backup solution (I’ll spring for the extra hard drive for redundancy) and a built in method for posting them online.
I would use it to backup my 3 Macs and 3 PCs as well as use it as a media hub for my photos, videos and music files.
What wouldn’t I use the EX490 for?
Everything from backing up the 2 pc’s and 5 laptops in my house to streaming digital media to all my network connected devices would be great.
Just recently installed Windows 7 on my main pc and I am excited to test out the new TV archiving features. Still waiting for those 4 tuner cablecard devices from Ceton to come out so I can really put it to good use.
Hi,
I would use the EX490 at my mothers place. She is a hobby photographer and works from home. My worst nightmare would be her lose of data, but as her economy is right now we only rely on a single external hdd. The EX490 would save her day, and my day as well on the day her hard drive would die (and I now it will in 6-9 months).
This would give me peace knowing her data would be safe, and she could share her photos on the web on a easy way.
BR
Kenneth
I would use it to backup 3 laptops and HTPC on my home network and of course as a media server for the above as well as 2 WD HD TV Live media streamers.
I looked at WHS some time ago and could not justify the cost but the new EX looks much better. With all its functions I could really have a joined up home and a system that the rest of the family could understand, share and more importantly have difficulty in breaking.
Yep I’d mirror the drives straight away.
I like the backup features, the aggregated disk management to use up all my old disks and media server for itunes and sharing to my TV and my Mac.
To stop the backup paradox scenario I would still have a beefy pc with all my files on and use a sync program to sync the files to the WHS. That way the WHS becomes the backup device and with a few tweaks it also becomes the music, tv, video and pictures server for the tv, photo frame, iphone, itunes, mobile 6 and other devices in the home.
I’d point all the other network devices to the 490 so all music files were in one place. If the pc fails or if the drive in the 490 fails or if the files on the 490 become corrupt I am still safe!
I’d use a gigabit router to connect it to a 300mbps wireless network, that ought to do it.
And for me, well backup my work files, use a vmdk depository and playtime for some options for other appliance type functions.
For some reason I am also pleased to see it will be a quiet running machine. However it’ll make a change for the house to be filled with more media noise than the kids can make!
Welcome to the connect world.
I would back up all the files from our laptops in one place to help my wife find all her files.
I could keep all the Music, Photos and videos in one place and stream to every room in the house.
I would use the server primarily to back up files. I have had 3 hard drives fail. After the last one we paid $1,000 to have all the data recovered. I do not want to do that again.
I would use it to back up the 6 laptops i have as well as 2 pcs. And then to further use it to stream converted video to my ps3 or xbox 360
I would use it to back up 5 computers running Win 7
plus stream to all those pc’s
plus feed 2 HTPC’s
I would use to the Media Smart Server to back up all our laptops and computers. It would also be used to back up all of our pictures so that if we need to get my pictures when away from home then I would be able to access them where ever there is internet access.
It’s crazy but my husband and I have a total of two desktops, two laptops (one is a MacBook Pro), two iPhones, an HTPC and a pseudo fileserver and… no backups! So the first thing we would do with a brand new HP MediaSmart server is to configure backups. I’ve been doing some reading up on the topic and I’m very impressed with the fact that it won’t store duplicate files for our three Vista OS’s and that daily backups are fully automated.
Our second major task would be to centralize all our media. We both like to travel and have thousands of photos that we like to share with family and friends. And speaking of family, my sister is in Australia while my husband is from Sweden — having the ability to locally manage remote access to our media instead of having to upload them to a third-party service would be a huge win for us.
We’re also avid music lovers and have about 500GBs of music (my husband prefers FLAC format for example 😉 between the two of us. Making all our music available to all computers throughout the house (and beyond — I’m constantly streaming my music from my home network to work) would be fantastic!
Our third step would be to move the installation of SageTV from the HTPC to the HP SmartMedia server so I could stop worrying about managing storage space from the hours and hours of HD recordings we have (primarily nature and science shows). And I’m pretty sure I would also end up taking advantage of the video conversion utilities that come with the MediaSmart server software!
And last but not least, I expect I would become a fairly active participant of the HP MediaSmart / WHS community. Once I come up to speed on something, I like to help out others who come along for the ride 🙂
The first thing that comes to mind is taking thousands of pictures of our one year old. with having family all over the country something that could easily share the pictures over the Internet would be great. Of course the backup of those pictures would really put us at ease also. I would also use the Media Smart server to stream movies and pictures to all the PC’s in the house including the HTPC. Having remote access when we are on the go would be very useful for many things. All in all we would use all of the great features of the Media smart server!
Hi,
What to do with a HP EX490 ?
– First of all, I will use it to store copies of all my important documents such as “bank papers, family papers, work papers…”
– After that, i will install a “openNAB server” for my little Nabaztag rabbit and create some little scripts executed thanks to ztamp:s (RFID) (for example : giving by voice thanks to my Nabaztag what remains in my fridge, creating backup of my professional laptop and giving infos about the last backup with the Nabaztag…….)
– I will also associated the EX490 with my Internet Box, already linked to my TV. With that, i will be able to synchronize all my new movies to my TV and after having seeing them, keep a copy of my movie on my EX490.
– I will also use it to see movies directly on my windows mobile 6.5 phone during my travel to work.
– I will also try to do something with in relation with my home, i don’t know exactly what but IP camera, power saving, electric store should be amazing with.
I’m not sure I can play to this blog game because I’m in France… so, sorry for my poor english level.
Doune
I have been looking forward to this new device for quite a while. I was planning to do the 485, but with the discovery that the esata port not supporting multiple drives, this put me back to looking at the 47X. I will need the extra room, but am not ready to modify the 47X to the processor speed that I would like. This 490 looks perfect, but I haven’t purchased yet as the economy has tanked and 6mo old twins have tightened up our belts for us.
The backup features on this look just amazing, and as someone else mentioned, having the baby Einstein movies to be streamed to my PS3 would make life just that more simple. And setting up the remote access to photos would be the feature the rest of the family would like the best. There are so many great features, I seem to find more each time I look at another forum.
Jack
To put it simply, I’d use the HP MediaSmart EX490 Server as the hub. The hub to what you might ask…The hub to my life. Obviously I’d use the EX490 to back up my 3 windows machines (2 XP desktops & 1 Vista laptop) and the single Mac laptop. But from there the EX490 would be the single location where all our media viewing would happen. A single location for my families pictures and home videos and not just the family that live in the house, we’d be able to share this media with the grandparents – they’ll love it. Then of course we’d be able to watch all the online videos we purchase right on our TV streaming from the EX490. The HP MediaSmart EX490 Server would be our one location to store what amounts to my families entertainment and memories!
Oh, I would then have the EX490 backed up online via KeepVault…We’d never lose another family photo/video again!
I would use the mediasmart server to backup files and store store video for use on my network.
Honestly I would just use it to improve my HTPC and get away from using my desktop as my sharing server. I would also love to give my wife the ability to use time machine on her mac. Thank you for the chance to win!