Michael E. Chancey Jr.

HP-EX470 Windows Home Server

// November 26th, 2009 // Reviews

This little box is probably one of the best products I have ever purchased for myself.  It took some convincing to get me to switch from freeNAS but I am more then happy with this servers performance.

I have since purchased an eSata port replicator(TR5M-B) to house up to 5 additional 2TB HDD’s for extra space. Even though the EX-470 only supports 4 additional HDD’s in the unit I spent the extra $15 and just hope some day they may fix that issue.

I am now in a holding pattern waiting for FedEX to deliver my TR8U to hold up to 8 more 2TB HDD’s, that’s up to 16TB of space.  You can see below I have added the wire frame in anticipation for its arrival.  Since the EX470 only supports a single eSata connector the additional storage must be connected via USB.  After reading a couple of other reviews though it looks like two TR8U’s might be the limit.  I am not even sure that the second will perform well enough to stream video from.  Of course I will have to fill 16TB’s before I am ready to find out.

By this time you might be wondering what on Earth I am doing with this much space.  Well its quite simple I back up all of my home computers and laptops including my Mac’s .  I also use this device coupled with a PopcornHour A-110 to serve as my multimedia center.

I am converting most of my movies over to Blu-ray which are about 8-16GB per movie.  2TB actually goes pretty quickly at that rate.  Combine this with the fact that I have replication turned on for my video folder each movie is now taking up between 16GB and 32GB of storage.

I will make sure to post more screens once I have added the TR8U to the Windows Home Server and have more space.

Update…

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Well the upgrade went fine, although the TR8U has a drive labeling issue as far as I am concerned. For whatever reason it labeled the bottom most disk “A” until I inserted the second disk at which point the bottom disk became disk “B”. After inserting disk three into the device the labeling was as follows. Disk 1 = “B”, Disk 2 = “A” and Disk 3 = “C”. I can’t wait to put a fourth disk in and see what it will label it.

Here are some pictures of the storage after the upgrade.