The market for NAS devices has grown significantly in recent years as more and more people use them as a means of distributing multimedia content in their homes and small businesses using them as an alternative to a full fledged file server. However, there is a big gap between the most basic versions, which lack any form of redundancy or use proprietary software to interface to the device, and the much more expensive versions, which act as truly independent file servers with redundancy and extras like print servers. Well, today I’m looking at a device that’s trying to fill that gap, the HP Media Vault.
The HP Media Vault comes in two variants, mv2010 and mv2020, with capacities of 300GB and 500GB and RRPs of £249 and £349 respectively. Both versions share the same extensive list of features, including space for an additional SATA hard drive, print server support, Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, SMB/FTP/http access, and RAID-1 and JBOD.
Physically, the Media Vault is larger than most NAS devices of similar capacity and resembles a slim desktop case more than an external hard drive. This seems to make sense as it squeezes in room for a second disc and an expansion card, an integrated power supply, and the motherboard and CPU that controls everything. However, opening it revealed a less than optimal use of space and where the slot for the expansion card should be was just the solder pads on the board, so it’s really just a waste of space.
The styling left a lot to be desired too, with a fairly thin coat of silver-grey paint covering the steel case and a thin plastic panel adorning the front. Of course, none of this matters since you’re probably hiding the box under the stairs or behind a desk.
The front bezel features a flap for accessing the additional drive bay, a USB 2.0 port, a power button, and a row of status LEDs. On the back you’ll find a power outlet, a Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB 2.0 ports, a reset button, and a cover plate for the aforementioned phantom expansion card.
After adding an additional hard drive (if required) and turning on the device, you can run the Windows-only configuration program to find the device on your network and set up default folders on your computer for you. Or, if you know what IP your network has assigned the device to, you can simply access the web interface directly – by typing the device’s IP into your browser – and start the setup from there.
After installing and launching the software, you will be greeted with the following screen.
The Start Explore option simply opens your Media Vault folder in Explorer. The second option opens a custom interface that lets you assign a drive letter (aka drive mapping) to your network folders. The third option opens the web interface configuration utility.
When you go to the Backup tab, you have the option to back up individual files, your entire hard drive, or restore your entire hard drive. The first option only opens the NTI Shadow backup utility, which is separate software that you can access from the Start menu. Likewise, the other two options simply open the NTI DriveBackup software.
NTI DriveBackup takes full backups of an entire hard drive and allows you to create a boot disk so you can recover your system drive in the event of a disaster. The data is saved as a single file that you can compress – this saves space, of course, but the compression process takes some time. NTI Shadow handles files rather than entire discs and includes a previous versions option that allows you to specify up to nine previous versions of a file to keep in your backup. Both pieces of software are very easy and intuitive to use and offer extensive scheduling options, so once set up you don’t have to touch anything – at least until you need to perform a restore.
The Help & Support tab does exactly what it says on the tin; provides access to the user guide, an online support page, a registration page, and the HP website.
Most users are happy to let the various wizards and applications do the work, but if you need to do more in-depth configuration, you’ll need to use the web-based configuration utility. This allows you to fully configure your NAS box, from changing the IP address to creating a RAID. It’s too much to go into detail about the options in this review, but I’ll give you a quick overview.
Under Shared Folders you can create/delete/modify your various shared folders. You can add password protection and set FTP, web browser, or standard network (SMB) access, assigning read-only or full access to each.
The print server function is very easy to use, just connect the printer, wait for the printer to appear in the Shared Printer section, and then add the printer through the usual procedure of your operating system. There are no settings in this section, just a list of printers and their network names.
If you have a digital media adapter, you’ll be happy to know that you can enable media streaming for each of your folders. Streaming is done using the UPnP A/V streaming protocol, so currently only unprotected files are supported. This is not to be confused with Microsoft’s Digital Media Connect, the protocol used to connect your Xbox 360 to Windows Media Player, and in fact your 360 does not recognize your shared folders on this computer.
In the hard drive settings, you can partition, format and resize your hard drives, create a RAID or JBOD. If you connect external hard drives, you can also configure them in the same way.
Network settings include changing the device name on the network, defining workgroup or user based access, and switching from DHCP IP assignment to manual settings.
If the device is running in workgroup access mode, you can only add or remove an administrator password in the user settings. If you use user-based access, you can add/remove additional users and assign individual access levels to each user as well as control their access to the configuration utility.
Finally we come to the system settings. From here you can change date/time settings, energy saving settings and perform a firmware update.
Because the Media Vault is essentially a PC running a stripped-down version of Linux, you can access the embedded Linux distribution and extend its capabilities to set up a telnet server or run a bit torrent client . However, I am not a Linux fan, so I did not test this aspect of the appliance.
I tested the drive for raw speed by running IOMeter and then transferring a 1.07GB file and folder containing 1,943 photos, totaling 497MB, to and from the NAS. IOMeter returned numbers of 23 MB/s read and 16 MB/s write speeds, while transferring large files was slower with 14 MB/s read and 10 MB/s write speeds. Finally, the many small photos were even slower at 4.8 MB/s writing and 3.7 MB/s reading. These numbers compare well to the Maxtor Shared Storage II 1TB and Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS NV, which write at 12.3MB/s and 14.4MB/s, and 25MB/s and 19.2MB/s, respectively. s delivered when reading.
“‘Verdict”‘
The MediaVault is a very successful NAS appliance that combines a first-class range of functions with excellent performance and flexibility. The bundled software is great – at least for Windows users – and the ability to customize the embedded Linux distribution makes this a true one-box-dos-all network storage solution.
As for price, I don’t think the extra 200GB that the 500GB version offers is worth the £100 premium and I’d go for the 300GB version along with a massive second drive with 750 GB decide.
However, it’s worth noting that no UK version appears to be available at the time of writing. However, customers in the US appear to be well catered for, as several stores, including HP’s online store, stock it.
Edit: This morning I received an email saying that the 300GB version is indeed available from PC World.