Product Reviews

HP makes a wide variety of products from printers to PCs, but the Media Vault MV2010 is the first network-attached storage (NAS) device we've seen. It looks like one of HP's Pavilion tower PCs shrunken to the size of a large telephone directory. It isn't loud, although we could hear the occasional whirring of disk activity in a quiet room.

The web-configuration interface is clearly laid out and easy to navigate with all the options unmistakably labelled. It's one of the best NAS configuration interfaces we've seen. A setup utility automatically offered to map a drive letter to shared folders on the Media Vault for easy access.

The included backup software can schedule backups as well as keep older versions of your data in case you delete or change files you shouldn't. There's no support for Windows file attributes, which can be troublesome, as read-only files will become alterable, for example.

The Media Vault has a single 300GB hard disk, but we were surprised to find a removable tray that can accommodate a second SATA hard disk. The two disks can

ADVERTISEMENT

be configured as a RAID 0 array, so they pool their space together as one large volume. Alternatively, they can be used together as a RAID 1 array, halving the total capacity available for use, but preserving all your data on one disk if the other fails.

Although the Media Vault isn't the fastest NAS we've seen, it performed well when dealing with large files. It was more lacklustre when copying small files, though, with particularly slow write times. Copying lots of small files to and from the Media Vault will require patience. Shared folders can be password-protected, but different users have to log in with the same password instead of having their own individual, customised access privileges. The same limitation applies when users access the Media Vault remotely via FTP, which isn't very secure.

We had no trouble playing videos and music stored on the Media Vault using a UPnP network media player. Using the Media Vault to share a USB printer and the contents of USB flash drives and hard disks over our network was also problem-free.

We liked the Media Vault's uncomplicated configuration, RAID support and respectable performance in our large files benchmark. However, we were disappointed by its sluggish speeds in our small files tests. It's also fairly expensive at 90p per gigabyte.

If you just need a simple file server, we'd recommend TrekStor's 250GB DataStation, which costs only £114 (reviewed in Labs, Shopper May 2007). If you need a NAS device with extra features such as a UPnP server, Maxtor's 1TB Shared Storage II, is excellent value. It doesn't have an FTP server, but at 46p per gigabyte, it's a better buy.