Server

Olive is a company well known for their high-end HD music servers. We were just told about their latest, the Olive O3HD, which is the company's first HD music server priced under $1,000. A bargain, considering other Olive systems cost at least twice as much.

The Olive O3HD is based on the Olive O4HD, but by coming in at a lower price point, music lovers who couldn't afford a higher priced Olive system now have the opportunity to experience the superior sound quality that Olive offers. The O3HD is a standalone solution with 500GB dedicated storage, color touchscreen navigation, and it requires no software installation, networking setup or virus protection. Olive designed this to be as hassle-free as possible. Read more

The SS-439 Pro Turbo NAS will feature an Intel Atom N270 (1.6GHz) CPU, 1GB DDRII memory and DOM (Disk on Module) architecture. You can store up to four 2.5" HDDs in this NAS, which supports RAID 0/1/5/6/5+hot spare configurations. If you're worried about power consumption, don't. The Pro Turbo NAS only consumes 18W!

The SS-439 Pro Turbo NAS also features a built-in iSCSI target service (max 8 iSCSI devices) with Thin Provisioning, Online RAID Capacity Expansion, Online RAID Level Migration, AES 256-bit volume-based encryption, Wake on LAN, automatic policy-based IP blocking, instant SMS and email alert, plus more. Additionally, you can make use of the included "Surveillance Station" (network surveillance) with a maximum of four IP-based cameras for office security monitoring.

Currently, there is no information regarding the release date or price. You can get the full press release here.

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Then you might want to check out the Acer Aspire easyStore. This small server works with DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) 1.5 Certified Home Server (DMS) and digital media player (DMP) to enable music playback as well as photo and video viewing on a TV. The easyStore also allows you to have one 1TB HDD and up to three 3.5-inch internal hard drives, adding up to a total of 7TB of total data storage. This home server is fairly small too, with dimensions of just 8.3-inches (H) x 7.8-inches (W) x 7.08-inches (L).

Other specs include:

• Intel Atom Processor 230 (1.6GHz)
• Microsoft Windows Home Server
• 2GB DDR2 Memory
• 1TB Hard Drive (2)
• Three Empty Hot Swappable Hard Drive Bays
• Five USB 2.0 Ports
• One eSATA Port
• 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet
• 200 Watt Power Supply
• RJ-45 LAN Port

Get the full press release here.

The main strength of the HP MediaSmart Server is central storage and media streaming for music and photos over your home network. Special iTunes support allows iTunes playback on connected computers that use iTunes.

You can serve photos directly from the MediaSmart server or upload photos to Facebook, Picasa or Snapfish. I do not see Flickr support in the announcement though.

In addition to media center type serving of music, videos, and photos the server also performs a network backup for Windows and Mac computers on a home network. To add additional redundancy you can add Amazon S3 for offsite storage. The HP Media Collector can schedule centralizing files from the other computers on the home network.

The HP MediaSmart Server ex485 will have 750 GB of hard drive space at $599 and the ex487 will double the hard drive storage to 1.5 TB and a price of $749. Storage can be expanded to 9 TB later. They both contain a 64-bit 2.0 GHz Intel Celeron processor and 2 GB of RAM. Read more