HP MV2020 Media Vault 500 GB External Hard Drive

Manufacturer : Hewlett Packard Model : MV2020 ASIN : B000IMYIA8 Price : 399.99$ See Special Offers Product Description Does your family store, swap, and enjoy lots of digital photos, music, videos, and documents on your home computer network? HP Media Vault mv2020?expandable home network storage?lets you easily manage, share, and store everything. How much can it store? Up to 232,000 photos, 116,000 songs, or 145 hours of DVD-quality video. Also use MediaVault to back-up your main drive. It's the drive for your home network. Access up to three printers from PCs or laptops on your home network Use with wired- and wireless-networked computers in your home by connecting to your router via Ethernet cable Create automatic backups that can be set up to run weekly, daily, or continuously with the included software Protect your data with the RAID 1 capability Restore your PC in one step in the event of a hard drive failure, virus, or spyware infection Watch TV shows recorded with your Media Center PC on other PCs in your home Watch movies Increase capacity up to 1.2 terabytes with the empty expansion bay (enough to hold up to 500,000 photos, 16,000 hours of music, or 340 hours of DVD-quality video Compatibility - Windows, Mac-, and Linux-based computers HP Warranty - hardware, one-year limited; software, 90 days Most Helpful Customer Reviews 102 of 111 people found the following review helpful: Serious shortcomings regarding the mediavault This review is from: HP MV2020 Media Vault 500 GB External Hard Drive (Personal Computers) The hp mediavault 500GB version was delivered to me yesterday. Because of the following, I'm going to return it: 1. No Mac Support - yes, hp says this product works with mac os x. What they don't tell you (until after you buy it) is that they don't *support* macs. I opened the box and saw the installation cd. I popped it in my mac only to notice that all of the files seemed to be windows files. I rechecked the box for the mac drivers. I scoured the disk, looking for the mac folder. Nothing. I found on one of HP's support pages how you can do a standard "connect to server" to at least see the drive. Big deal. I could do that with samba for any drive on the network! However, where's the whole "back up your whole hard drive" option? Assuming I must have missed something obvious, I finally called HP. To my shock, the tech person told me, "We don't support mac". He said it as if I should *obviously* know that macs aren't supported. When I read him both amazon's and hp's website indicating that it says, "works with both windows and mac", he said, "oh, it works with mac, we just won't support it." (!!!) I tried to explain to him that that is what's called "deceptive advertising". I have no problem rsyncing my data. However, it would have gone a LONG way in my decision regarding whether or not to buy this product. If I have to rsync the data myself, why shouldn't I just get an old beat up machine, stick two 500GB drives in them and rsync to that? 2. You don't really have access to the second drive - When I opened the box, the first thing I was curious about was what kind of drive was included with the media vault? Is it western digital, segate/maxtor, or their own drive? So I tried opening the door only to see that I couldn't. Only one door opens; the other is a false door. So when I spoke to the HP tech person, I brought this to his attention. If the extra drive I bought fails, I can replace it. I asked, what happens if the drive that comes with the unit fails? "Oh, just return it to HP and we'll put a new drive in and return it to you." I was more specific. "What happens if the drive fails beyond the warranty?" I was told that in that case, I have to pay. So if you thought you could just pop out the failed drive and stick in a replacement, you can, with one MAJOR caveat. As long as the failed drive is the additional one you bought, you can. If it's the one that comes with the unit, you'll have to ship it back to HP and pay whatever they feel like charging you. Along these lines... 3. You can't pop the drive out yourself and replace it. Well technically you could take the drive out with screwdrivers just like you could any hard drive in any computer. However, the little mini-operating system used to do the mirroring isn't on a ROM chip; it's on the drive that comes with the unit. Furthermore, that mini-os (I think the tech guy said it's a modified linux variant) doesn't get mirrored to the second drive in raid 1. So when the first drive fails, which has the os on it, you have a very heavy paperweight!!! Again, you are forced to go through HP to fix this. HP uses their own os and they don't provide it on their site so you can't just download it, install it on a new drive and pop it in the machine. Once you buy this product, you're married to HP. I don't like that at all!!! If the problem was just the first point, I would have gladly given this product five stars (assuming everything else worked over at least a couple of months time). But the whole purpose of me having mirrored data in a raid 1 configuration is that if ANY of the drives fail, I pop it out and put in a new one. YOU DON'T REALLY HAVE THAT OPTION WITH THIS, ALTHOUGH THAT'S NOT MENTIONED ANYWHERE!!! I'm going to return everything I bought and just put together my own machine dedicated to backing up the network. You've been warned. 36 of 40 people found the following review helpful: Simply amazing! This review is from: HP MV2020 Media Vault 500 GB External Hard Drive (Personal Computers) I received the HP MediaVault yesterday and was just amazed at the speed and ease with which I could put this to good use. Simply hook up the Ethernet cable and the power cable and switch it on. Then browse to "HPMediaVault" in your browser and "wham" your talking to the built-in web server of the device (the only setting you really need to change there is the "workgroup name"; make it the same as the settings on all of your PCs). Or go to "\\hpmediavault\fileshare" and you're already looking at one of the pre-programmed shared directories (you can easily permanently attach a drive letter to those directories through Windows file manager). Creating additional root directories and even opening up one of them to be an FTP server is dead-easy. And the most amazing thing is the "\\hpmediavault\mediashare" directory. I have a Roku SoundBridge and it immediately recognized that directory as an available media server without changing any setting on the Roku or on the HP MediaVault. Isn't it wonderful when technology just works? The HP MediaVault is also blazingly fast and has 1-Gb Ethernet support. I will soon try to capture DV video directly to the device, and have good faith it will do that without dropping a single frame. 27 of 31 people found the following review helpful: this product has problems This review is from: HP MV2020 Media Vault 500 GB External Hard Drive (Personal Computers) The operating system for the media vault is a unique proprietary linux variation which only hp uses for this particular product, nothing else. The implications of this are as follows: Within two days of receiving this product, the filesystem of the hard drive became corrupt. What that means is that there was nothing wrong with the hardware, only the software. Unfortunately this software cannot be fixed. Hp's solution is to send you a new hard drive because the original hard drive was useless. If you have any data on the original hard drive, it is lost. You do not get any tools to rescue it, to restore it, to recover it. None. HP can't help you. The product comes with software to restore your own computer's hard drive but nothing to restore the harddrive of the media vault. Even more absurd, the media vault allows you to install a second hard drive. However if you put the original media vault hard drive into the second slot and then install a new hp hard drive into the first slot, the device still will not be able to read the data from the original drive. This product does not meet the reasonable expectations of its customers. It cannot do what computers have been able to do for twenty years, namely use rescue tools on disks, like fdisk for windows and fsck for linux. No tools work on the hp drives. And both windows and linux computers allow you to put a corrupted hard drive as a slave in your computer in order to read the data. You cannot do this with a media vault. You cannot even put the media vault hard drive in a linux computer to read the data. It won't work because of the proprietary nature of the operating system for the media vault. For the first time in using computers for twenty years, I have lost data. I am very upset at hp for the very short sighted design of this product. You are warned. Most Recent Customer Reviews Beware of power bumps -- data difficult to recover After a power bump the MV2020 which we'd had for 3 years died. Called a tech -- he could not recover the data! Called HP, and they can't do it either. by RossDave Works well despite noisy fan I purchased one of these in late 2007. Within a year or two it became quite noisy and I assumed that the hard drive was about to fail, so I backed it up. by Mark Murphy Mine Failed - Out of Warranty Loyal HP customer no more. While I love this device's features and ease of use, mine failed just out of warranty. by R. S. Welker You will loose your Data, Period I have used the MV2020 for 13-months. Suddenly, it started making a "screetching" loud sound coming from inside the unit. by G. Boutros Slow Access I like the idea of accessing my file from any computer on the network. I also liked adding my printer into the network. by D. M. Smith No Support and limited compatibility Let's see. I can't use it to restore an IBM laptop and there is no software support for the Mac I'm using to replace the $2000 paperweight that is a brand-new T61P (did I mention... by Jeffrey Abbott Savage HP Media Vault is UNRELIABLE My HP Media Vault has been unreliable from day one. For starters the drive that shipped with my unit had areas of corruption. by Matthew J. Thomas Good basic NAS system While this NAS doesn't have all the bells and whistles of some systems, it is a good basic unit. One benefit I liked was the ability to RAID at the partition level rather than... by P. Roddick Save your money... I purchased a media vault today, thinking what a great product it would be. I plugged it in and was amazed how cool it worked and how easy it was to setup. by T. Bailey Excellant Product!! Excellant NAS. Fast by comparison to Argosy and other NAS that I've used. I wish it had Bittorrent client built in! Security is sometimes confusing on the device. by M. Patel

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