Pimp my Home Server

Just before Christmas 2008 I bought the HP EX475 MediaSmart windows home server. After reading about it before I purchased it I already knew that the puny 512 MB ram that it came with was too little so I already had 2GB ready for installation when the server arrived.

Now a little over six months later the 1TB disks was already over 75% full and I was tired of the underpowered CPU chopping up performance whenever the server tried to do more than one thing at the same time. The server uses AMD AM2 slot CPU’s and I bought a new 2.6 GHz Athlon processor for just over 300 NOK which is a really nice price for a CPU. Following the excellent guide from Home Server Hacks the procedure was quick and painless. Installing a new 1TB disk was also done in a few seconds.

Now my EX475 has 4 times the RAM, 2 times the storage and a CPU that is clocked at 45% higher frequency (but also quadruples the L2 cache) compared to the original. In other words my EX 475 is now more like a EX 485 than the EX475 that it once were.

And to be honest it was needed. If you want to do anything other than sharing documents and backing up PC’s you need to upgrade the RAM and CPU.

What about the EX470/EX475?

HP has earlier said that they would also release a software upgrade for the older EX47x series. But they still will not commit to a time line for this release and I’m starting to feel left out in the cold here. Is this yet another case of trying to hold existing customers warm by promises, but in reality they have no plan to actually release anyting, but hope we get tired of waiting that in the end we buy next new shiny device instead?  I’ve been “dumped” by HP, Dell, HTC etc. so many times I cannot count. It’s all a race about pushing new models with new features. You get a few updates in the beginning, but as soon as a newer model is out all but critical updates dry out. That’s a real shame, especially since the models are so similar. It would have been much better for HP to release one set of software for their MediaSmart series and then just disable or give a warning about things the older EX47x series might not be able to handle like the real-time video transcoding.

via:
http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2009/04/12/hp-announces-25-software-update/