Linksys Media Hub NMH405 in Storage appliances

There are all sorts of benefits of running a NAS drive on your home network. You can use one to run backups, manage downloads or serve audio and video without having to leave a PC or laptop switched on all the time. But for many users NAS drives are simply too complex to set up, or just too awkward to deal with. Linksys is aiming to change that with its Media Hub range of devices - an attempt to bring NAS to the masses.

The first sign of this is in the design. The NMH405 is clad in a living room-friendly gloss black finish and adorned not with the usual status LEDs, but a colour LCD panel. From here you can view various status screens and even kick off a backup.

More important than this, however, is the device's embedded web user interface. Log on to the NMH405 using a web browser and you're presented with an unusually friendly iTunes-style front end with listings for music, video, pictures and data. You can search and sort by artist, album, song title and so on, and even play tracks, view slideshows and watch video directly. The list of compatible file types is impressive, but don't expect it to replace your media streamer - though some standard definition video files play back smoothly in full screen mode, HD and more demanding lower-resolution video stutters annoyingly.

Other nods to ease of use include a facility that crawls your network for UPnP servers and imports files automatically, plus an easy-to-use remote access service. Turn the latter on and there's no configuration required - all you have to do is visit a special web page, enter your hub's unique name and you're in, with access to the same friendly front end. It's very easy to use, but we're not so keen on the subscription charges; the service is only free for 12 months, after which you have to pay $10 per year.

Underneath the consumer veneer, it's still a NAS drive, however, and it's a reasonably well-equipped one at that, with Gigabit Ethernet, a 500GB hard disk preinstalled and a second bay free for adding more storage. Once again, ease of use is a high priority: access to the drives is a simple button press away, and drives are slotted in using a tool-free caddy system. Other more traditional NAS features include an FTP server, standard UPnP and iTunes servers, and backup over USB.

We're very impressed with the NMH405's simple approach - it's the easily the friendliest NAS we've used - but there are two key problems. First it's very slow compared to most recent devices - we measured read speeds at just 11.8MB/sec and writes at 8.8MB/sec - and second it's costly. As a result, we just can't wholeheartedly recommend it.

Author: Jonathan Bray