HP Media Vault -- NAS we go again

You didn't think HP, a company known for its bulletproof corporate storage solutions, was about to just let Maxtor eat up all its chances for butting into the nascent home NAS market, did you? We acquired some interesting info on their first foray into consumer network attached storage: the HP Media Vault, a run of the mill RAID 0/1 unit coming in either 300GB / $379 (with one empty bay) or 500GB / $549 (with one empty bay) configurations. It'll also feature gigabit Ethernet, three USB ports, and expandability up to 1.2TB, but our favorite bit from the internal HP briefing was where some analyst at a pre-briefing noted the unit was "Well designed. Will be better once it is not designed like a PC." So who knows, by the time this thing gets released perhaps it'll look a little less like a Pavilion s7600 Slimline, and a little more like the ugly coupla drives in a box that it is.

[Vini @ Sep 18th 2006 4:41AM]

nice, might look into this to run alongside the netgear SC101's i use.

[lucifix @ Sep 18th 2006 6:19AM]

whats a NAS?

[Stefan @ Sep 18th 2006 6:53AM]

NAS = Network Area Storage

[@ Sep 18th 2006 7:02AM]

Attached, not Area.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Attached_Storage

[Odi @ Sep 18th 2006 9:35AM]

Stefan, I think you're getting NAS confused with SAN, which is "Storage Area Network" :)

[Owen V @ Sep 18th 2006 7:47AM]

I could so use one of these

[Covert @ Sep 18th 2006 8:21AM]

It's got some nice features but it's $200 more than the 500 GB Maxtor NAS. I'm not sure if the expandable bays and gigabit LAN make that justifiable.

[Andy @ Sep 18th 2006 8:28AM]

Wonder what it's got in it and how hackable it'll be, also notice there's an expansion slot at the bottom!

[Odi @ Sep 18th 2006 9:29AM]

300 or 500 GB, that is very dissapointing. Raid 0/1? Again, very dissapointing.

My 2 year old Terastation has Gigabit, Raid 5, and 4 x 250 GB drives for a total of 1 TB or 750 GB with raid.

This new HP brings nothing to the game. There are plenty of non RAID 5 Gigabit NAS to go around already.

[general Public @ Sep 18th 2006 10:00AM]

Value-wise, BuffaloTech's Terastation eats HP and Maxtor for lunch.

[Sean Shrum @ Sep 18th 2006 10:25AM]

If you want something that you can put together yourself that has gigabit, raid 0/1, 2 USB, supports two SATA 1 drives, fan cooled, FTP server, and has a print server for around $200, get the D-link DNS 323 (http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509). Only problem is that they're backordered even thru the D-Link store. :( Mine's on order to replace my trusty Iomega StorCenter Pro 160 (modded to 300) (http://www.iomega.com/na/products/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=19871991&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=20982807&ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=26890319&bmUID=1133204289941)!

[Raymond Thang @ Sep 18th 2006 11:16AM]

Can someone tell me what the USB ports and expansion slot are for... I'm imagining attaching add'l hard drives and such, but maybe there are other uses [print server?]

Thanks

[badbob001 @ Sep 18th 2006 12:26PM]

why do i get the feeling that the powersupply fan is all that is cooling this baby. heat == harddrive death. I would guess the expansion port would be for a wireless option.

[blackout @ Sep 18th 2006 8:20PM]

i want more NAS

�_�

but i think i'll just re-use an old pc to get it.

[Chris @ Sep 22nd 2006 10:56AM]

We just got one of these in at Best Buy yesterday. It looks pretty cool. It's identical to the slimline pc's. The USB ports can be used for printers as a print server. There's so many of these now, it's pretty much just get the one that's the cheapest.

[Chris @ Sep 25th 2006 3:25AM]

I just picked up one today, it has 3 USB ports for print server or USB hard drive expansion, the card cover in the back is covering a whole lot of nothing. There is one drive installed that is not easily removable, the other is in a hot swap style bay but it does not support hot swap. The biggest negative is that it uses a propriatary linux file system, it can read NTFS and FAT 32 but not wright to it. it supports multiple shared folders with passwords assigned to each. also supports HTTP and FTP access in read only and full access modes. also supports media streaming, i assume this is for the media bridge units but not sure. hope this answered any questions you all had.

[vraicovi @ Sep 26th 2006 3:03AM]

Great idea, but they need to do something with the pricing and setup of the device. They should be looking at something that offers a level of data protection, like RAID 5. 0/1 is all well and good for speed and value, but I'm not trusting my data on anything less.

[blueeyesm @ Oct 6th 2006 11:11AM]

Tom's Hardware has a performance chart on this unit - http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/10/03/nas_chart_thecus_n5200_hp_media_vault/page2.html

Like most home NAS consumer devices, this unit is misleading when it states it can provide gigabit performance (write = 96Mbit/sec, Read = approx. 126Mbit/sec). Since its read data is above 100Mbit, HP take it the extra step and allow their marketing dept. to label it as 'gigabit'.

[Jayadevan @ Oct 14th 2006 7:25AM]

Hi,
i would like to know more about the connectivity of the device, will the device be able to connect to the network via a switch?

Regards

PS: Please reply asap.

[lee810 @ Oct 28th 2006 1:35PM]

You can find out a lot more information about this product at my FAQ/Knowledgebase here:

http://www.k0lee.com/hpmediavault

I worked on the product and have set up the FAQ and a user group to answer any questions you may have.

-Lee Devlin

[Tore @ Sep 8th 2008 11:13PM]

Lee, how do I connect / setup a drive to my HP Media Vault from my iMac? The media vault is wired to a Dell wireless router. My iMac is wireless.

Thanks,

Tore