CES: HP MediaSmart Server now supports Mac

Last week we got our first HP ex485 WHS unit. We had it on back order for a few months and were very pleased to get one of the first units that our distributor received in stock. Over those same waiting months, we also accumulated four (4) Seagate 7200.11, 1.5 TB hard drives (the ones with the corrected firmware), and wanted to see what that new unit would do with a gross of 6.0 TB of drive storage. We were pleased to see that the OEM hard drive in the new ex485 was, in fact, a Seagate 7200.11 drive (750 GB), so we figured the 1.5 TB drives would work. We were correct in that assumption.
Initially we replaced only the original OEM drive with a 1.5 TB drive and restored the entire WHS system with the restore CD-ROM that was provided with the ex485 unit. The restore went flawlessly and completely installed all the HP WHS software, just as it had come from the factory. Once we initialized the ex485 and got it functioning correctly (which was a very easy task), we sequentially added each additional hard drive to the array, until all four drive bays were humming along with 1.5 TB of storage in each slot.
That was a week ago, and the ex485 hasn't skipped a beat since then. The HP tweaks to the original WHS software suite are also quite nice and very useful. I must honestly say that it will be hard to beat this new ex485 with a home built WHS unit (and I've built many of those during the past year). I'm damn impressed with this little shiny black box, and its awesome storage capacity of 6.0 TB. Try one, you'll love it!
Best regards to everyone. Ima DingBat

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