Hewlett-Packard EX495 Black Friday Deals!
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Hewlett-Packard EX495 Black Friday Deals!.
Product: Hewlett-Packard EX495 Amazon Price: Too low to display Availability: In Stock |
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Working in the computer industry for over 25 years, I'm not easily impressed. Two quad-core processor, 8 GB of RAM and 2.5 TB of storage in a home pc... nice, but objective "more of the same".
Most of the computer innovation of the last couple of years has been "more, faster and bigger", but nothing revolutionary.
However, the original MediaSmart EX495 is truly amazing: the rush, the capacity, but more importantly: the ease-of-install, and ease-of-use that DON'T "handycap" the "power user", are astonishing.
I had the server up and running in a few minutes. It's now supporting 6 users, 1 MediaSmart Connect x280n (why did they finish making that!? ), and 1 Roku M500. I added a second 1.5-TB hard drive and have already filled almost half of the total capacity (25,000 songs, 28,000 pictures, 600 videos, and loads of other stuff) . This includes doubling almost every directory (I like this feature over Raid 1 as it provides distinguished more flexibility), and backups of all PCs. The most impressive was how it enables external (acquire) access by directly interacting with the router to open/forward the correct ports. And it was immediately successful.
Still to do: connect a USB cable to my UPS and try to state up sparkling shut down.
This slight guy got delivered by Amazon a few days before it's recent release. I am not considerable of a directions guy, but was extremely joyful with how easy this was to residence up and how intuitive it was when it came to setting it up. I've got 1 workstation, 2 netbooks, and 2 laptops that backup wirelessly to this guy. If they are already on the same wireless network, it's simply a matter of clicking the 'add computer' button. There's no need to fuss with any of the backup settings unless you are particular, as it will do the work automatically for you. You can then either access your files via the console or remotely at your convenience.
I can't stress enough how nice and convenient it is to be able to centrally access all my files without having to swagger files help and forth between the local hard drives and having part of mind smart it's being backed up automatically. I previously did this with Time Capsule which while it worked at times, was tempermental and expressionless. I'm not certain how well this will work on Mac, but I am running various flavors of XP and Vista in 32bit and 64bit configs.
I even decided to add another storage drive (Seagate Barracude 1.5tb 7200rpm) for redundancy. Adding storage was a simple as pulling out an commence drive bay, popping in the unusual drive, then going into the management console to click through the add storage wizard which took less than a exiguous. Now I've got 2.6tb's of storage, more than I'll probably ever need and 2 begin bays to expand down the road.
I upgraded my EX470 model and the 490 didn't disappoint. My wife now is a Mac user and the Time machine backups are working astronomical. HP really improved the experience with the software - everything looks and operates grand simpler than the prior version. Media streaming to my xBox 360 works large as well.
I'll add more as I play around with other features, but so far, so excellent!
