Review: HP Mediasmart Server EX470 server

Slow off the starting blocks, but HP’s Windows Home Server interface is polished

Tranquil PC was quick off the mark to sell a Windows Home Server (WHS) in October 2007 (read our review), with heavyweight HP holding back its punches until now.

Its Mediasmart Server EX470 is its entry-level model, costing £399 and coming with a single 500GB hard disk, while the EX475 adds a second 500GB disk for a £100 premium.

It’s deceptively small and reasonably quiet too. The front and rear panels are made of porous grilled plastic, allowing a constant torrent of air to cool the system. Both models contain four 3.5in bays, four USB ports and an eSata port for storage, which HP says can handle up to nine terabytes. Having two hard disks in a WHS is a good idea too, since Microsoft’s Drive Extender redundancy features mean if one disk fails, your shared folders can still be recovered.

The drive bays are hot-swappable caddies that require a firm tug to remove. Each bay has a light, which goes blue when a drive is present, or purple if it’s empty; these lights can be dimmed from within the WHS console.

Like all WHS devices, this HP model offers shared folders, UPnP streaming for videos and music, scheduled backup of 10 computers and remote access.

HP goes further by adding Photo Webshare, which allows users to host photos via the built-in web server, and an iTunes server. Having a centralised collection of your music is neat, but HP’s implementation isn’t great since it can take a while for it to automatically consolidate your music and there’s no manual option to kickstart this process. It also won’t deal with any tracks you’ve bought from the iTunes store.

The delay to the Mediasmart’s debut has given HP some time to polish the interface. This includes placing its extras on the front page of the WHS console and including some interesting diagnostic feedback, including system and CPU temperature (a cool 27C and 25C respectively). HP also provides more dynamic DNS options than a standard WHS installation along with an HP web-server template.

If you’re not interested in the WHS add-ins on offer, the Mediasmart excels as simple, if expensive, network storage. With a Gigabit switch we measured consistent write speeds of 40.2Mbytes/sec and average read speeds of 20.6Mbytes/sec ñ faster than any other network-attached storage (Nas) device we’ve tested.

Its AMD Sempron 3400+ CPU and 512MB Ram tick the minimum requirements Microsoft specifies. Only 480MB of the Ram is visible to the operating system though and we suspect the remaining memory is appropriated by integrated graphics. We failed to find a video output, which is a shame, as being able to connect a monitor to reinstall the operating system or diagnose problems would have been useful.

The EX470 drew 3W when turned off, rising to 46W when turned on (idling). This is disappointing for a device that will probably be turned on every hour of the year (annual running costs in the UK sit at around £38), especially considering the Tranquil PC version only needs 30W and some notebooks in this month’s group test draw just 18W.

Parts of WHS remain difficult to get to grips with and its documentation still has holes in it. The fact that the WHS console doesn’t work with 64-bit operating systems, combined with its high energy consumption, means we can’t recommend it just yet.