HP MediaSmart Server LX195

The MediaSmart Server LX195 is HP’s most affordable home server and is a lot more approachable than its larger line of home servers. The LX195 is designed to make it easy to backup all of your multimedia content and access it from anywhere.

At $400, the LX195 is much more affordable than the MediaSmart EX487 ($749) and MediaSmart EX485 ($599). THe LX195 has a smaller footprint at just 4″W x 8″H x 8″D.

I highly recommend HP MediaSmart servers to those who are serious about backing up multiple notebooks.

The MediaSmart Server LX195 comes with a 640GB intenal hard drive and four USB ports so you can add external hard drives as your storage needs grow.

Setting up HP MediaSmart Servers take a little patience, but they can really streamline your digital life. The LX195 can automatically back up both PCs and Macs, aggregate your multimedia libraries and stream them to local and remote devices.

I have an HP MediaSmart EX487 at the heart of my home network. I’ve loaded it with four Seagate Barracuda drives and an external Seagate FreeAgent Xtreme drive for a total of 6TB of storage capacity.

The EX487 It backs up four of my PC notebooks and two MacBooks. It allows me to access my media library from my PS3 and iPhone 3G. I really like how the server consolidates photos from all of my PC notebooks into a single folder.

The LX195 can do almost everything that the EX-series servers can, except stream video to remote devices and stream content to iPhones via HP’s iStream application. If you’ve only got a notebook or two to backup and don’t care about streaming video remotely the LX195 will do just fine.

The MediaSmart LX195 runs on an Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM.