Review: Linux Powered HP Media Vault Pro mv5150 (Page 1 of 1)
Written by
Steve Lake
Posted on: Jun 09, 2008 at 01:56pm
Section:
Hardware
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The HP Media Vault is a wonder of feature rich, simple file sharing.
Based on Linux, it is capable of some pretty amazing feats despite it's simple,
small design. It ships in sizes ranging from 500gb upwards to 1.5tb and is very easy
to setup and use. But how simple is simple? A simple as sunshine on a
cloudless day. But don't take my word for it. Instead, let me show you.
A simple peak inside the mv5100 series unit reveals two drives (or at least my review
model had two), one of which is removable, and one of which is fixed. Each of the
two drives in my unit were 750gb each. The Linux OS runs from an embedded storage
device and operates on a very simple and quite well featured Mini-ITX board with some
interesting features, including two Sata controllers. When you first get the device,
it's immediately ready for use and can be setup to be used as is, or you can configure it
to do a variety of other things.
Just plug it in, wait for it to boot up and you're ready. Oddly though, it
doesn't boot as fast as some other NAS (network accessible storage) devices I've seen.
Heck, it doesn't even boot anywhere near as fast as my hand built home NAS, and
that's saying something. But I think part of that is to blame for the fact that the
unit is required to do quite a few things before it's completely ready to be used.
So it's slow bootup can be forgiven a little on account of that.
It does come with configuration software that you can install on Windows if you like,
but overall that really isn't needed. The included Control Center software really
doesn't do anything special that you can't already do through either your browser on the
configuration web panel, or via standard SMB file sharing. This means that anyone
who is using this device, regardless of the operating system they're using, can make full
use of all of its features. There is an automated backup program that comes with the
control panel that allows you to automatically backup your computer to the media vault.
The level of backups it does is interesting. You have a basic files backup, a
complete hard drive backup, and interestingly enough, an image level hard drive backup.
You can backup your entire hard drive as a disk mirror that you can use to restore
your system at a latter time. That's pretty amazing in my opinion. There is
also programs for syncing with iTunes, updating the system, restarting the unit remotely,
and even monitoring the unit for issues. On Windows it will even help you map a
drive letter to the Media Vault if you like.
If you're running Linux, you really shouldn't need this tool at all, but if you do, you
can run it safely through Wine. And speaking of backups, the Media Vault even has
its own backup. So if something happens and you want to backup certain files off of
the unit and store them on another drive just in case, there's an option to backup the
Media Vault either via a connected USB drive (there are two usb ports to allow this), or
via an online backup across the web (you get 2gb of online storage with your unit).
To access the web interface, just open your browser, type in the unit's IP, and hit
enter. Just click on configure at that point and you should be greeted with a screen
like this:
The control panel gives you eight basic areas you can use to configure and control your
Media Vault. Another interesting thing about the unit is to does not allow you to
store files in the root of the drive. Everything is done via shared folders.
This gives you a level of control above what most NAS devices have. You can
specifically add users, add folders, change permissions on those folders and more.
Folders also have public and private settings, media streaming, photo sharing capabilities
and more. The control panel allows you to set all of that quite easily.
Which is something else that's unique about this unit. The Media Vault uses
Apache 2.0.54 for its web server, complete with SSL access, and PHP 5.1.2 (you can't use
this yourself as it's only for the media vault) to give you full web photo and file
sharing if you want. By default when the system starts out, it automatically seeks
an IP via dhcp. If your network isn't DHCP enabled, you might have issues getting
the Media Vault working initially until a static IP is assigned. But doing that is
very drop dead easy.
To access the unit across the network with SMB file sharing, just open your file
manager and type "\\MediaVault" for the SMB hostname. It should connect
you immediately. You can then enter any one of the pre-configured folders and begin
sending and receiving files.
Management of disks is also very easy, although limited in nature. By default
only disk 1 is setup when you receive the unit. This is because you may not choose
to use both disks. If you don't, either a red or pink in my case, light will appear
on the removable drive bay and a blue "ok" light will appear on the fixed drive.
If you choose to use both disks, you can easily join them together in either a Raid
0 or Raid 1 array. Once you join them together, the initial setup is pretty easy and
quick, but if you plan to do Raid 1, it's going to take a little while for the unit to
completely mirror the first drive. But once it's done, you're good to go.
The unit also has a web sharing system, as mentioned before, that allows you to share
files and photos over the internet, or even stream media, but requires that you have or
setup an account with HP through one of 10 different services, in order to do this.
If you don't, you can't stream your media or photos over the internet.
Now, we're down to the biggest question of all. How well does it perform on the
network with file sharing? Actually, it performs quite well. In a simple test
transfer, it pushed nearly the same, or slightly better transfer speed as my home NAS, and
managed to move 4.5gigs of Linux isos from my computer to the unit in about 10 minutes,
which is right on par with the normal transfer speed of my network. I suspect that
it could go a bit faster even than that on a Cat5e gigabit network. So it's no
slouch in speed for certain.
The total size of the unit is also quite impressive. It's really not much bigger
than a short loaf of bread, and amazingly quiet. I'm sitting here right now not 3
feet from it and you can't hear a sound. You actually have to put your ear right up
to the unit even to hear a peep out of it. It's completely unintrusive and you can
pretty much just toss it in a corner and forget about it. It also seems incredibly
rugged, although I wouldn't recommend tossing it around like a hackey sack to test that
theory. But believe me, it's built to take a beating should the need ever arise.
The unit I reviewed sells for about $650 (the smaller models sell for as little as $250) and in my opinion is well worth the price. I'm very
pleased with the unit and while it seems oriented more to the home user than the office
user, I see absolutely no problems with a big office using this unit to share files and
data across their network. Certainly you could build an equivalent NAS yourself for
a little over half the price, but you wouldn't get all the free extras that HP includes,
plus support, plus the warranty, plus all the perks. You could certainly get a few,
but it'd be a lot of hard work and the ease that a "plug and play" NAS provides
you vs one you'd have to build and maintain yourself more than makes up for the extra
cost.
So check one of these out as soon as you can. I think you'll like what you see.
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