HP MediaSmart LX195

Small and quiet; low power usage; 640GB storage; fast file transfers

Not the best value; not powerful enough to transcode high-bitrate video

At the listed price of $400 ($300 on Newegg), the LX195 is a little pricey given its limited upgrade options. It’s a suitable solution if you use both PCs and Macs and don’t plan on greatly expanding your home network.

do a restore, you'll have a more roundabout recovery process than you'd like

Started out as a great inexpensive server. My needs were backup, remote access and centralized storage of pics, videos,music for the family (7 PCs). Easy for me to setup, even the server restore went better than I thought it would. Support was good...

Hard Drive Controller/Cable issues. I have researched, worked with support on this nagging issue. No one seems to have any answers. Event Viewer shows Parity Errors in the Disk and Controller errors all leading up to a system lockup. real intermittent....

Small, very quiet, reports it has backed up all our PCs, though you're never sure about back ups until you have to restore

Sends annoying red security alerts to any active PC about AV and firewall security risks when other networked PCs can't be found, i.e., when they're powered down. The alerts say the AV and/or the firewall protection is turned off on those powered down PCs

Small footprint; Windows setup is easy; remote access feature is useful despite clunky interface

Doesn't play nicely with Snow Leopard; Mac interface is not good; Time Machine backups stopped working after two months

It does what it's meant to do rather well. The set-up was quick and mostly painless and I've yet to run across any real issues backing-up data or streaming media. It also takes up very little space and is very quiet

It'd be nice to have additional room for another internal drive or two, but that's what you sacrifice for something as small as the LX195 is. The only other "complaint" is that it at times struggles streaming 1080p video, but it's a small Atom...

Not too loud ; promo price is spectacular ; 4 USB ; Fast for an Atom processor, emulates/has 2 cores ; Overall, it's performed well

No VGA/Audio out if you want to physically manage it ; only a 320GB drive included (should probably have been a 500) ; It's actually a solid little box, and for the price you can't really complain about anything

if you can get this at the promo price ; software as simple as humanly possible ; quiet operation ; very low power requirements. easy auto suspend mode ; Window Home Server can duplicate all files to another hard drive (has to be external for this...

biggest con, can only handle one internal hard drive ; no esata ; RAID setup not possible ; 640GB is "Blue" series, not "Green

Streams my videos to my XBOX 360 ; Backups my computers ; very fast for a atom pentium cpu ; windows home server

none

The WHS software is great. I do automated backup of two comps nightly, one XP and one win7 and it's trivial to set up and use. Best thing is the file duplication: you can set up any directory to duplicate and it will ensure a copy is on two different...

Slow. I'm pretty sure I failed to stream 1080p bluray across the network - but it was coming from usb drives so who knows which fault. I'm going to keep my smaller raid5 subsystem for caching high-bandwidth stuff since I love the usb support. Wish it...