HP MediaSmart Server EX490 in Desktop PCs

Amid the buzz around Windows 7, Windows Home Server has largely dropped off the radar – not that it was ever more than a faint blip for most people. But we’ve always had a soft spot for HP’s MediaSmart range, awarding the original EX475 a five-star review back in 2007. And now the formula has been updated with the HP MediaSmart EX490.

From the outside, nothing's visibly changed. The compact micro-tower case remains discreet enough to hide away yet tasteful enough to leave on display, with gently coloured LED panels showing power and error states. At the front a door swings open to reveal the familiar four drawer-style screwless SATA drive bays, the bottom one populated with a 1TB Seagate 7200.12 hard disk. And, as with previous MediaSmart servers, there are also four USB 2.0 connectors and an eSATA port, yielding support for up to nine drives.

But in several ways the EX490 is a more powerful beast than its forebears. System RAM has been bumped up to 2GB of DDR2, and the old Sempron CPU is replaced by a 2.2GHz Intel Celeron 450. That’s still a very a lightweight processor, but it’s more than ample for everyday server duties and it contributes to a low power draw of just 35W while idle, rising to 50W under load.

And when it comes to software there’s plenty here that’s new. Naturally, you get all the standard features of Windows Home Server with Power Pack 2, including support for shared folders and automated backup. You can install drives of any size and type and they’ll all be merged into a big storage pool, with specific files optionally mirrored across multiple drives for insurance against drive failure. Home Server’s remote access gateway lets you access your files from afar.

Beyond this the MediaSmart EX490 has a predictable focus on managing and sharing media files. HP has retained the iTunes and TwonkyMedia server plugins from the original EX475, and added numerous new custom features that occupy a whole sub-menu within the Home Server Connector.

The key is the HP media collector, which can automatically copy any songs, photos and movies found on client PCs to the server, effortlessly creating and maintaining a central library for all your media. The streaming server can then pipe these audio and video files to devices both on your network and, via web access, beyond.

To help with the streaming, HP also provides an automatic video converter that monitors new videos and DVD dumps arriving on the server and quietly generates H.264 MPEG4 versions that will play on most video receivers. You can control the frame size, frame rate and bitrate, but be warned that the EX490’s Celeron processor can make high-quality conversions a slow process. We found it took around half an hour to convert a two-minute 1080p WMV9 file into a full-resolution MP4.