hp mediasmart or snow leopard server?

[soARCHITECT]

Is HP Mediasmart a better solution than Snow Leopard Server?

I would like opinions on whether HP MediaSmart is preferable to Snow Leopard Server in this situation:

1) mixed windows and mac environment (3-5 users)
2) file sharing is a must
3) calendar and mail sharing would be nice
4) home-office environment
5) file access when not at home (via -web)

Unfortunately, running Windows (vista) is required because certain applications are available on the this platform. I have been considering the HP media-smart server because of the cross platform capabilities.

Is an NAS the best option? Currently, we are using external hard-drives formatted with Fat32, which is really a band-aid solution.

Thank you in advance for your advice.

 

[milk242]

If the whole calendar and mail sharing isn't really a requirement, I would also look at this:

http://gizmodo.com/5388904/iomega-ix2+200-nas-review-it-does-all-this

I've personally used an HP mediasmart and it is nice for what it does, still can't do email and calendar sharing, but the web access features and media and file sharing features are nice.

I've also used a leopard server, and I do like the calendar and mail sharing thing (never tried it outside the internal network), but it requires more configuration and might not be as friendly with windows devices. I suppose you could share using NFS and it wouldn't really be a problem since both windows and osx supports NFS sharing protocol.

If you have more windows pcs than mac, I would probably lean more towards the Hp mediasmart for the backup features and file duplication feature. Also, if you purchase the newest model, it supports Time Machine restores, which the previous models did not.

I think I would personally just build my own windows server with SBS 2003 with exchange 2007, but that is expensive and more complicated. Or even a linux box with netatalk and samba sharing and maybe an open source email server. But that is all fairly complex and you might not be willing to spend the time tinkering and messing with it.