Home Server

I bought 2 HP Media Vaults – MV2020 for storage capacity and print server capabilities. One held all my files from the past 20 years, including priceless family photos, and the other was purely backup. Both have failed catastrophically within several days of each other!! Discs spinning loudly as though out of control, unable to shutdown, and burning smell. HP customer service has been absolutely useless – website shows warranty expiring almost a year before I bought the units! After wasting time on the phone, I was told they would provide warranty replacement once I prove my purchase date (from Amazon), BUT I’m out of luck on all my data! Now trying recovery methods that will cost many times more than the HP units did in the first place!! DO NOT use HP Media servers even if obtained for free – not worth it! I thought I could trust the brand name, but found out HP is as worthless as their products.
Rating: 1 / 5

The focus of this review is going to be primarily focused on the user friendlness and technical aspects of this product other than the actual functions itself. It you want to know what a home media server does, Amazon provides a fabulous description of its many exciting features. Essentially, however, these Media Servers are miracle products that transform the digital junkie into a sorcerer of digital magic. This baby streams your files to any computer in your home and also makes them accessible anywhere with internet thanks to web servers. Living in the digital age has never been more fun. If you have tons of pictures, videos, music, or any computer file you consistently like to share with your family and friends then you definitely NEED one of these Media Servers – the question is, is this the right one?

After a month of tinkering, experimenting, playing around, and pressing buttons here is my list of Pros and Cons that I’ve run into so far:

PRO:

+ Easy Setup

– Installing hardware has never been my forte, but setting this up was a breeze. The only hiccup I had was my own fault for thinking I could get it to completely function without plugging it into a Router. I should have followed directions better. You HAVE to have a router for this to work. And not just any either, it needs to be specifically designed for network usage. I bought the Belkin Wireless N+ 802.11n Router (Black) and it worked great.

+ Assigning/Restricting User Access

– When making up user names and passwords for my family to have remote access to the files I was overjoyed to discover that I could limit what files and folders different users had access to. Not only did this make me feel like an all-power media master, but of course there were some files I didn’t want my grandma to have access to.

+ Online Access

– This is perhaps the best feature. While my family owns 3 computers in the same house, most of the people I wanted to share my files with didn’t live with me. Setting up and accessing the files online was extremely easy. The server has a clean interface that lets users access and download the files from the folders in which they have access. It’s very easy to find the files you’re looking for because it doesn’t waste time looking fancy. This is also amazing because I can access word documents from work or anywhere else where I might need some of my home files.

+ What It Does

– Okay I admit I’d never heard of a Media Server until I got this but now I don’t know how I ever survived without it. No more USB sticks, no more emailing myself files. I can keep it all on my server and access it from Anywhere. Not to mention with a family that has many computers in the home already it’s a digital dream come true being able to listen to my music anywhere.

CONS:

- Logging In & Out

– This might seem a bit picky but because I enjoyed setting up various access abilities for different users it kind of became a problem when different members of the family wanted to log into the main server. I couldn’t find a “log out” or “switch user” option anywhere and found that the only way to log out was to restart the computer.

- Memory

– It seems like a just a year ago that 650 GB was such a ridiculously large amount of memory it wouldn’t be possible to fill it up. Now, however, as we store our videos and everything imaginable in a digital file, it makes me a little nervous that the memory could and would be soon used up on this guy. It does have the ability to add additional memory and external hard drives, but if you don’t want to have electronics connected into electronics connected into electronics it’d be nice to have more memory. Especialy since it uses a lot to backup my entire computer every day.

- Questionable Functions

– While my Media Server continuously reminds me it has successfully backed itself up I don’t necessarily trust it. Maybe I’m just paranoid but I wouldn’t completely put all my faith in this guy to keep your files safe. I don’t trust it as much as my regular external hard drive either, so I made copies of all my files before putting them on the server. It makes me feel better, although I have no particular reason to not trust it except that it will occasionally inform me that the backup procedure failed and that it would try again later.

OVERALL OPINION:

I am in LOVE with this Media Server!! It’s like having a digital juke box, photo album, and video screen that you can use anytime, anywhere. Is THIS the media server you need? Well… that depends. It’s at a great price but I think the memory will eventually become a problem, especially if you choose to use it as a sole hard drive. Personally I think it would be a good idea to look into the Linksys by Cisco 1 TB Media Hub with LCD as it has a Terabyte of memory and a more interesting (although perhaps more complicated) interface. I would NOT recommend HP EX485 MediaSmart Home Server or HP EX487 MediaSmart Home Server because the upgrades from this one hardly look worth the price jump. If memory isn’t a problem, however, I couldn’t find anything that looked better than this on Amazon.

Hope my review helps! Happy Shopping!
Rating: 4 / 5

This server has worked well and would probably rate more stars if I only owned Windows machines. The product is sold as a PC/Mac-compatible storage device, but that is true only in the sense that it is used as storage as they define it. I was looking for a storage device that I could use as not just a common store point, but more importantly a backup site for all of my workstations, PC and Mac. Turns out that the only way I can use this device with my Mac’s TimeMachine backup utility is to physically cable it to a router. Hello HP? Don’t you know the world is going wireless? Consequently, I have had to physically reconfigure my whole wireless network and now need to make sure my Mac is “plugged in” on a daily basis. Very disappointing.
Rating: 1 / 5