New HP MediaSmart Servers Share, Backup Media
ex485/ex487 Acts as Central Hub for Digital Audio, Video, Pictures
Dec 30, 2008
Digital media collections for many today include complete libraries of audio, video and digital image files. These collections, gathered over time, can easily be lost if a drive goes missing or becomes corrupt. While one can painstakingly restore the collection a file at a time, restoring them from backup hosted on a media file server is a much simpler solution.
HP is offering one such new home media server for consumers wanting to manage and backup their digital media collections. The new HP MediaSmart ex485/ex487 is designed, according to HP, to automatically backup and allow access to digital music, videos, photos and documents from multiple computers on a home network.
Organizing Both Mac and PC Media Files
This new HP MediaSmart, updated for use with both Windows and Mac computers, runs off of the Windows Home Server platform. The ex485, priced around $600, holds 750 GB of media files, while the ex487, priced around $750, holds 1.5 TB. Both will be available sometime in February 2009.
HP says the MediaSmart home media server organizes the media files it finds across various networked PCs and Macs and accepts additional internal drives to offer storage of up to 9 TB. With the large amount of storage and networked ability one can access a huge variety of locally stored media content online from anywhere an Internet connection can be found.
A wide variety of functions can be done with one of these HP servers. Collection and organization of the vast array of networked media files can be scheduled for nighttime hours. Data backed up from Windows machines can be done via the Windows Home Server backup feature, while Mac backups can be done on machines running Leopard and using Apple Time Machine software.
Backups and Special Media Treatments
Photos and iTunes libraries get some extra treatment on one of these HP MediaSmart servers. It can be used to centralize iTunes music libraries on different networked computers so they can be played on another networked computer running iTunes. Digital photos, besides being available for local sharing, can be uploaded via the server directly to Facebook, Picasa Web Albums and Snapfish.
Further backup functions, besides those already mentioned as platform specific, exist in that the server duplicates designated shared folders to a separate hard drive. This is in addition to designated folders optionally being backed up to Amazon.com's online S3 backup service.
Other features of the HP MediaSmart ex485/ex487 servers include power management which can be scheduled by the owner, an Intel Celeron 2GHz 64-bit processor and 2 GB of 800 MHz DDR2 DRAM memory. You can find out more details about this new HP servers at the product Web site.
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