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

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

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

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.

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 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

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.