Home Servers

[bt22]

I have been looking at getting one of HP's Media Smart Home Servers. I can't decide if it is worth $200.00 dollars more to get the pentium chipset or go with the celeron. Does anyone here use one of these..? Would appreciate any comments ....

Thanks,

 

[Wotan31]

Celeron is bottom of the barrel. Why do you think you need a home "server" anyhow? What are you serving? And to whom?

 

[OllyW]

A lot of the new home servers are running Atom processors. The Celeron in the EX490 easily outpaces these Atom based home servers. HP gives this comparison of the performance of their two offerings...

The Intel® Pentium® 2.5 GHZ 64-bit Dual Core Processor converts videos 7X faster than servers with an Atom processor and can convert a 115 min video in 70 minutes.

The Intel® Celeron® 2.2 GHZ 64-bit Processor converts video 3.5 times faster than servers with an Atom Processor and can convert a 115 min video in 145 minutes.

 

[Wotan31]

A lot of the new home servers are running Atom processors. The Celeron in the EX490 easily outpaces these Atom based home servers. HP gives this comparison of the performance of their two offerings...

Celeron > Atom, obviouslly, but those numbers from HP are nonsense. What is the frame rate of their 115m video? Resolution? Bit rate? File format? They give no specifics at all. It's like those silly hard drive advertisements that say a 1 TB hard drive can hold 800,000 photos, or 50,000 videos, or 300,000 MP3's. How long is a piece of string?

 

[bagelche]

How long is a piece of string?

3X longer and 8.4X more efficient than last year's string.

 

[bt22]

Looking at it as more a central repository for digital media than a server. I like the idea of giving me a URL for remote access. I like the idea of the ability to swap drives with larger ones as drives increase in size as opposed to having several external hard drives. I am open to other suggestions.

 

[OllyW]

We Got Served is a good home server site, have a look and see if it answers any of your questions.

An alternative to the home server is a NAS drive. Manufacturers like QNAP, Synology and Thecus pack a lot of features in and this could be what you are looking for. Check out Small Net Builder for reviews.

 

[pprior]

What the heck, this is macrumors.

Just buy the mini server and forget all that pc server nonsense.

 

[entatlrg]

Looking at it as more a central repository for digital media than a server. I like the idea of giving me a URL for remote access. I like the idea of the ability to swap drives with larger ones as drives increase in size as opposed to having several external hard drives. I am open to other suggestions.

I'm looking at setting up the same thing between my Mac Pro, MBP and MBA and also looked at the HP Home Server. Best Buy here doesn't carry them anymore due to apparent problems or poor sales.

How doe the Mini Server cooperate with Windows, Vista/7?

What other options are there? Some say buy a computer and set it up as a server, but I'm looking for ease of set up, remote access and most importantly a 'central hard drive' to store and save all files to from my 3 computers.

Suggestions welcomed 🙂

 

[entatlrg]

From reading on the Apple site the new Mini Server seems like the perfect solution.

 

[bt22]

I looked at the Mini but I didn't like that you can't swap out the hard or have multiple hard drives like you can with the HP. You would have to attach external hard drives on the mini. I am not fond of that idea.