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It allows music, photos and videos to be played on your media players (wireless photo frame, iPod, or, with an extender, your TV).Want support for this. It allows pictures, movies/videos, music and data files to be stored in a central place and shared within the household.
It has, of course, been superceeded by the EX485/7, the EX490/5 and the HP Data Vault models, all improvements over this base model. I bought my HP MSS EX475 in December, 2007, when they first came out.
You can be operational in a half hour). It is a user-friendly appliance for archiving backups to your home computers allowing the restoration of single files or entire disks very quickly.
(Want to install a larger disk. (No need to share disks on computers or to have copies of all the files on each computer).
Start with the Forums over at [.].
This is the third set of HP drives that crashed just days after the six month warranty ran out. Tough luck for me. By the way, this thing does not support printers no matter what the marketing info says. I asked the tech support people about that and they literally laughed at me.
You have no choice but to send this unit to HP for repair. Great server as long as it works. With the diagnostics charge and parts it will at least cost you half the price of a new server. Mine lasted 1.5 years, looks like the power supply went, or possibly the motherboard. I called HP to get the parts, they do not sell the parts to the public. If I had of known this I would have bought a more standard computer based server or built my own. I will tear this unit apart however and see if I can get the part number off the power supply and do a search for it.
I have bought two of these servers now (one for my parents and one for myself). I use it to stream my large digital music collection to several rooms in my home via squeezecenter and stream my movie collection to my home theater setup. Allows you to share full quality downloads with everyone (i.e., not reducing picture quality by uploading on facebook, etc).
It's a must have for families with more than one computer (pc or mac). HP has released newer versions of the product which have more RAM which is very helpful. This is a terrific product for everyone.
The overall setup process is also very simple. The most basic function is backing up all the computers each night which allows for easy switching of computers and no worries of loss of data. Additionally, its easy to share pictures with friends/family.
If you are very tech savvy, than the sky is unlimited in regards to how to use this server. I highly recommend this product.
Later models of the server (EX485/7), do a somewhat better job of integrating with Macs than this model and the processor and memory are more appropriate for digital media serving on a large scale in the home.You'll probably want to upgrade the memory for this server as soon as you can - dealt with in the user community forums/blogs very well.However, I can't really say enough good things about the server, but it is important to note that many of the negative reviews regarding the server deal with issues that have been resolved within the past year. but the user community is large and helpful via many forums - you can find workarounds.
For media, it's fantastic to have my movies, music and photos centralized in a reasonably safe place. I bought this server on sale about two months ago and have not been disappointed with its basic functionality.For PCs, it has worked flawlessly as an image backup server.
Most of the PC functions are not available to the Mac (auto backup, etc). Additionally, the server is VERY expandable (storage size), which is a distinct advantage over the second gen which does not support eSATA port multiplication (recognizing multiple drives on one port).
It also will automatically check your iTunes collection, and add new songs, if you can't be bothered to organize your music manually to the server.For Macs, you can mount the server shares as separate drives and save to them just as easily as any other drive on your Mac. The console is available by web browser.
This is a great entry point if you want to make your home digital media centric.Hope this helps.
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