Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs Review & Ratings

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Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs Review

EW5000 is great concept considering the functionality it promises to provide. I was really excited about the product but unfortunately it turned out to be one of the worst engineered products I have ever seen. (ironically from the company claiming to be the "Inventors".
Yes, the product works and does provide all the features it claims to offer but let us look at them one by one.
User Interface:
In this age of sleek UIs with wonderful layouts and smooth text and buttons, EW5000 User interface seems to be a relic of 80s. Text is fuzzy on TV, there are two many scrrens for simple tasks. Even the BIOS setup UIs are better than this one!!!
Playing Audio:
Audio Quality is fine but the player seems to stop playing whenever it wants. There seems to be no logic to that. UI is not responsive at times and there is no error displayed. The track information UI stops updating after playing a track or two. Wait a bit longer and even the tracks wil stop playing till you hit the play button again and sometimes you have to pick another album.
Wireless connectivity:
Best feature but the worst implementation. The reciever often looses conection and takes forever to re-connect. Again in the year 2003, it shouldn't be that difficult to buffer 5-10 minutes of Audio so that such connection losses don't lead to moments of annoying silence for the listener. You will get many annoying pauses destroying the pleasure of Brahms symppony no. 1 or whatever you are listening to. And please do not blame the connectivity issues on my wireless access point and expect me to put EW5000 a foot away from my WAP.
Server Software on PC:
Doesn't auto sychronize the new addition to the library, takes too much CPU time and takes minutes to synchronize additions or deletions of just 1 or 2 albums.
The box itself:
The worst quality materials have been used to make this otherwise good looking box. Input connectors and the wires supplied seem to be worst grade that the money could buy. Don't even get me started with the remote control.
Bottomeline!! Well you get the picture.

Hewlett Packard DMR-EW5000 Digital Media Receiver for Windows PCs Overview

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Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 2.0 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W2.0IU2/R1 Review & Ratings

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Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 2.0 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W2.0IU2/R1 Review

I usually do not write reviews but this time after spending so much time doing a research on a good external RAID1 hard drive and finding no useful information I figured I'll write one up to save other people time and money.
I've read a whole bunch of reviews on Amazon and other websites all people complaining about DriveStation Duo RAID-1 configuration on Windows. Not sure what those people did wrong but they definitely got me concerned before buying this unit.
Before choosing this unit I've compared whole bunch of products available. I was looking for external hard drive either USB or NAS that supports RAID-1 for redundancy and I need to have a flexibility to swap one of the hard drives if needed in case it crashes after warranty expires by not going to the manufacture. Out of all products I looked at (Linksys, Buffalo, Maxtor, Iomega, SimpleTech and many others) I liked Linksys NAS200 the best as it gives you most flexibility with hard drives you choose and Linksys usually have a pretty good software to configure and maintain their hardware but the only downside with NAS200 was the speed. I don't need high transfer rates but I do need at least 10Mb/sec when NAS200 was producing around 3Mb/sec.
When I got the hard drive the one thing I was concerned about is configuring it for RAID-1 based on all the problems other users had (from reviews). I just ran a disk utility that comes with the drive, connected hard drive via USB and then configured it for RAID-1. It was that easy. No problems on Windows XP as other people reported. Then I just formatted the drive using Disk Management utility and it is ready to go.
I even decided to test redundancy so I copied some files to the drive and shut it down and pulled out one drive out of it. Started it back up and the drive was accessible with all the files there. So then I shut it down again and reconnected the drive and it started rebuilding it. According to their doc on the website it is supposed to take 8-11 hours for 500Gb hard drive but after 18 hours it did not finish and I decided to call tech support. After calling tech support they confirmed that the reconnected drive will not rebuild since it expects brand new drive RAW formatted and a drive formatted other than RAW it will go in infinite loop trying to rebuild it. First tech support suggested to format the drive while it was rebuilding it (which I didn't think was a good idea but did it anyway) and that didn't work (2-3 hours wasted). Then after keeping me on hold while (probably) reading some documentation tech support rep. said that because I opened up front cover the warranty is void and they can't replace it for me so he suggested returning back to the place where I got it from since there's no way to fix the problem any more. Then I figured I'll take it into my own hands and tried using DiskUtility to change the drive back to Normal Mode (2 independent drives) and that worked fine but changing it back to RAID-1 failed with misspelled error "Disk Restracturing failed". So, I formatted each drive using FAT32 (back to default formatting) and then tried converting it back to RAID-1 and it worked just fine.
At the end here are pros and cons of this hard drive:
+ Supports RAID-1
+ High transfer rate
+ Auto-power shut off (via USB). Nice feature. Starts up the drive when you start up your computer and shuts it off when you shut down computer.
+ Swappable hard drives. After hands on experience with the hard drive I found out that it will not be that easy to change them, but at least it'll get you the data if one crashes.
+ Easy to access hard drives - just few screws away
+ No need to install all kinds of drivers and whole bunch of useless memory and CPU wasting software to make this unit work. It is literally Plug-n-Play. Windows recognizes this unit without any issues. You can format it using Disk Management in Windows.
+ Comes with 2 Seagate hard drives and not some proprietary like other manufactures
- 1 year warranty. Some websites advertise 3 years warranty for this drive but support confirmed that it is actually 1 year
- Tech support. Doesn't seem like they know what they're talking about. They kept putting me on hold every time I ask them any question. My guess, they were looking for answers in some documents because they didn't know. Really takes them long time to come back with an answer and at the end those answers are useless and misleading.
So at the end, the drive seems to be performing as advertised. I got about 30Mb/sec when copying large files and over 100Mb/sec when copying some MP3 files. At the end, I think this is a good bang for the buck.

Buffalo Technology DriveStation Duo 2.0 TB (2 x 1 TB) USB 2.0 & FireWire Combo External Hard Drive HD-W2.0IU2/R1 Overview

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Save 14% Off: Western Digital WD Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit Review & Ratings

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Western Digital WD Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit Review

WD's Livewire Powerline little boxes allow for high-speed data flow over your residence's electrical wiring with ZERO setup - something that would have been viewed as a miracle or an impossibility only a few years ago. Anyone (such as myself) who currently relies on 'wireless' to connect various devices could use Livewire Powerline for those networked appliances that either can't connect wirelessly (many Bluray players and TV sets) or a high bandwidth channel is needed to stream HD content.
Before making a 'buy' decision, it is important to understand that Livewire will NOT significantly improve 'Internet' performance unless your ISP provides you with a very large bandwidth. If your Wi-Fi router supports 802.11g, you will get an average throughput of 22 Mbit/s which is more than most ISP can provide for Internet bandwidth. In other words, your Wi-Fi router should usually handle whatever the Internet may throw at you with some room to spare and whether you get your ISP's 10 Mbit/s data stream over at 22 Mbit/s from Wi-Fi or at 200 Mbit/s from Livewire Powerline it's still... 10 Mbit/s or close. On the other hand, streaming form your media server at will make all the difference in the world when compared with your Wi-Fi throughput.WHO NEEDS IT?
To summarize, you will BENEFIT from Liverwire Powerline when:
- You stream from YOUR media server
- Have some Internet-ready device that does not support Wi-Fi and your home is not 'wired' for Ethernet
- You have a big house or for whatever reason Wi-Fi can't reach some specific device or the reception is poor
- You have a VERY HIGH bandwidth Internet connection
You will NOT BENEFIT from Liverwire Powerline to connect to the Internet via a 'normal' broadband link and, of course, if your house is already wired for Ethernet.MY EXPERIENCE
To evaluate WD's Livewire Powerline I decided that I will first try it without reading the manual (a .pdf) or installing whatever software came on CD. To my surprise, I was able to set it all up and get it running in a few minutes. Still haven't looked at the CD.
In the box you find the 2 little (literally) identical Liverwire Powerline boxes, 2 power cords and 2 short (too short) Ethernet wires. And... yes a CD that should have some software that you COULD install and use if you had trouble setting things up. The boxes have 4 RJ-45 (not phone jacks) ports, an On/Off switch set to On by default (no need to ever set it to off) and some little lights that blink whenever there is data traffic.My setup and installation proceeded as follows:
- I connected the power cords to the boxes
- On each of the 2 boxes I connected one end of the Ethernet wires to one port on the box
- I placed one of the boxes near my router in the basement and connected the other end of the Ethernet wire to one of the router's ports
- I plugged the power cord into a wall outlet - must NOT plug it into a power strip or surge protector, it MUST go directly into the wall outlet
- I attached the Ethernet wire of the other box to my PS3 upstairs
- I plugged this box's power cord into the wall outlet
Once the above was done, I turned on my PS3 and set it to use the 'wired' connection. It recognized it within seconds and I was pleased to see the Internet test indicating an 8.2 Mbit/s, better than the 5.6 Mbit/s I had over the Wi-Fi. But that was not all. The big improvement was when I played a video off the media server located in the basement: flawlessly playing our 720p home videos over the new connection vs. choppy before over Wi-Fi.
As expected, the PS3 benefited but only to a small degree when it came to the Internet stream - it did benefit because the Wi-Fi signal strength was only 63% - and it benefited tremendously when media streaming was between in-house devices.
With 4 RJ-45 ports available, I am considering now getting a dedicated Blu-ray player and will not have to specifically seek one that had Wi-Fi built-in.MY EVALUATION
As far as I am concerned (see my experience notes above) Livewire Powerline is in many ways the perfect gadget. It does its magic, it does it well and 'the rest of us' don't need to bother with manuals or spend hours on hold with tech support - WD does provide a tech support phone number and a Web site if you get yourself into trouble.
I do not expect not think about this device again until I get my Blu-ray player. Like my Linksys router, I expect it to sit there, largely forgotten and gathering dust behind the entertainment center and do its job without me worrying about it at all. Which makes it perfect. And the price is not that bad either.
_________________________________
NOTE: WD claims that this will allow you to stream HD on your home network. This is true but be aware that not all HDs are equal. You will NOT be able to stream Blu-ray quality 1080p with 7.1 uncompressed sound - you will need 'Gigabit Ethernet' for that. You should have no problem streaming 720p with 2 channel stereo sound, which is what you are likely to produce as a 'home' video.
NOTE 2: I only tested with 2 boxes but I know of at least one person (my boss actually) who has 4 such boxes (an older model) in his house and happens to be very happy with the setup.
NOTE 3: See a discussion on my statement that "you will NOT be able to stream Blu-ray quality 1080p with 7.1 uncompressed sound" in the 'comments' sections of this review.

Western Digital WD Livewire Powerline AV Network Kit Overview

Wd livewire powerline av network kit extends the internet to any room using your home's electrical outlets. stream the highest quality hd video, play games, and transfer files within the home or over the internet using secure and reliable high-speed connections. get the performance of a wired network without running wires.

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