HP's mediasmart server, What a rip off Options

[pebkac]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16859105382

I mean seriously, this is price gouging. I would maybe be willing to pay that much for one if it came with a RAID 1 setup or something like that. But why couldn't they have just configured something like this with Windows Home Server? It would only come out to $20 more and be more than twice the system. Or maybe charge less. There's no reason for a computer with a sempron processor and 512 of RAM to cost that much.

[impala454]

A buddy of mine (with a wife and kids) uses it and swears by it. The main features are how it "pools" all the drives into one big drive, and the automatic backup of other computers on the network. He likes it for his kids computer's, as when they mess them up (which they do) he can go to the server and just click a button to restore them to the backed up state. It also supposedly has a really easy media sharing setup, as well as a remote web interface to access all of the stored media. I believe this web interface also allows you to create individual users. I.e. if you just uploaded new pictures & home videos of little johnny, grandma and grandpa can log in from timbuktu and see them.

IMHO it's not that big of a deal for someone who knows how to manually do all these things. But I can see how it would be very useful for a family who may not know how/want to bother with micro-managing & configuring several different applications/computers/routers, and easily share media with others.