While there are many things that this server can do in a home environment (like streaming music, video, and pictures to any computer or gaming system in the network), the most powerful feature for filmmakers is how effortlessly and powerfully it backs up your files. Once you set it up to back things up, it will back up things cleverly and reliably from then on out. What makes it especially clever is that, rather than copying full files of everything on your hard drive every time it does a backup, it instead makes an initial master copy and then backs up every file that changes in between one day to the next. Depending on how many files you change each day, this means that 1.5 TB could likely backup 1.0 TB of active storage for a month or more without having to delete earlier backups.
As I mentioned before, the main bread-and-butter of this setup is the ability to backup all of your network content to a central location. However, what it can do certainly doesn't stop there. In addition to enabling all your network-based computers and game systems to access common media files, it has programming to collect media files and convert them to more commonly used formats. This can be very useful if you want to batch convert a bunch of your videos for iPhone or other mobile solutions.
The system worked really well after I got it set up and got used to the interface. We've currently tested it for four months as we've been working on the Depleted: Day 419 film and it's held up extremely well. It has 4 USB ports and an eSata port so that you can add additional hard drive storage once you fill up the additional three bays in the EX495 chassis. (Unfortunately, there's no support for any other types of USB devices, so you won't be able to plug in USB printers or sync up your iPod from the server.)
The biggest complaint I have for this server is that it has no RAID capabilities. Considering this system is equipped to expand to as much as 17 TB, the lack of RAID capability is extremely shortsighted. As we learned with my original tale of terror, you CAN have dual hard drive failures back to back, so adding raiding capacity would be a great way to take that fear away from customers. (Perhaps HP is hoping folks will purchase two EX495s for redundancy purposes.)
