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HP MV2120 500GB Media Vault

HP MV2120 500GB Media Vault


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Brand: Hewlett-Packard
Category: CE

Buy New: See price in cart



Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars 24 reviews
Sales Rank: 795

Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Hard Drive Size: 500
Shipping Weight (lbs): 12
Dimensions (in): 5.5 x 9.6 x 5.4
nv:Memory Type: DDR2
Total Memory: 128 MB
Compatible RAID Levels: 1
Number Of Hard Drives Bays: 2
Hard Drives Included: 1
Hard Drive Interface: SATA
USB Ports: 2
RJ-45 Ports: 1
Interface Type: RJ-45
Data Transfer Rate: 1000 Mbps
Data Transfer Rate: 100 Mbps
Warranty: 1 year limited warranty

MPN: MV2120
Model: MV2120
UPC: 883585549856
EAN: 0883585549856
ASIN: B0015313O8

Release Date: April 1, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Features:
  • 2 Drive Bays/ Accommodates Any 3.5 Inch SATA HDD
  • 2 USB 2.0 Ports/ 1 Front/ 1 Rear/ Gigabit Ethernet Port
  • 500GB/ 7200 RPM SATA Internal Hard Drive Plus One Available Expansion Bay
  • Marvell ARM Processor/ SoC/ 128MB DDR2 DRAM Memory
  • Smart Energy Saving Hard Disk Drive Spin Down and Exceptional Power Consumption

Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Product Description
With the HP Media Vault, you'll be able to quickly create a centralized storage and sharing solution for your home or small business that can handle your most important documents, photos, videos, and music--including the ability to integrate your home's iTunes digital audio libraries. The Linux-powered HP Media Vault MV2120 comes with an integrated 500 GB hard drive (7200 RPM) as well as one expansion bay, enabling you to effortlessly add another Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive with a terabyte (1 TB, or 1024 GB) of additional storage or for RAID 1 mirroring.

But the HP Media Vault isn't bound by the limitations of your wired or wireless network. With its powerful remote access features, you can create a URL that authorized users can access via a Web browser to download files. And with Photo Webshare, you can create your own online photo albums from images stored on the Media Vault.



Add another 1 TB of storage to the HP Media Vault thanks to one SATA expansion bay.


The Media Vault provides access to all your networked PCs as well as to remote users via the Internet.

Media Vault Design
The redesigned Media Vault now shares the same black chassis design and glowing blue hard drive indicators as its bigger HP MediaSmart Server sibling. Measuring 5.5 x 9.6 x 5.4 inches (WxDxH) and weighing 7.1 pounds, the MV2120 is smaller than its predecessor (the MV2000 series Media Vault), and it switches to a horizontal orientation for storing its hard drives.

Opening the front grille reveals a slide-out expansion bay on top, which can be fitted with an optional SATA hard drive. The front of the Media Vault also includes blue backlit icon indicators for power, network connectivity, and health of the integrated and optionally installed hard drives, as well as a USB 2.0 port. The back of the device includes an Ethernet jack (10/100/1000 Gigabit), an additional USB 2.0 port, and the power button. You can connect additional USB hard drives to the Media Vault for additional storage and backup options. Note, however, that printers won't work with the Media Vault as it does not include a print server. The MV2120 is powered by the Linux 2.6 kernel operating system and includes 128 MB of internal RAM memory.

A Central Hub for All Your Files
Great for the home, home office or small business that requires a central location for files that devices on the network can share, setting up and using your HP Media Vault is simple. A few quick steps get you up and running 24/7, and it's ready to work for you no matter how many desktop or notebook PCs are on your home network.

For music lovers, you can centralize your iTunes music library and playlists on the Media Vault for playback on any computer running iTunes on your network. And you can stream media files from the Media Vault to your networked TV and other digital devices for high-quality playback. You can access your media files from Windows-, Mac-, and Linux-based computers.

The HP Media Vault also enables direct remote access to your files when you're away from home, or to others connecting from far-flung locales. You can create an online connection to your Media Vault from any computer with access to the Internet. Use it to access your media files while on vacation, a multimedia presentation from a client site, or to share your media with others. You can also authorize visitors to access your Media Vault remotely so they can view the file folders you have designated for sharing. And you can grant permission for visitors to add their own files to designated folders on your Media Vault.

With HP Photo Webshare, it's easy to set up groups for sharing different photo albums. For instance, set up a photo Webshare so friends can view an album of your latest vacation; or allow family from near and far to add photos from your family reunion to create one blockbuster album.

Protect Your Data
The HP Media Vault keeps your digital life organized, accessible and most importantly, more protected. With its 500 GB installed capacity, it stores and protects important media and files on computers throughout your home or small office. And with customizable backup options your files can be automatically protected weekly, daily or continuously. In addition, for ultimate protection, attach a USB hard drive to your Media Vault and backup the most important Media Vault files to take to a separate, secure location.

The innovative new design lets you easily increase your storage as your needs evolve. Use the expansion bay on the HP Media Vault to add an extra hard drive for greater storage or the additional protection of a second mirrored copy of your data (RAID 1). For enhanced data security, use the expansion drive for creating a full backup copy of your most important files to store in a separate location.



The HP Media Vault Control Center provides easy management and configuration.
Easy Set-up and Management
The HP Media Vault Control Center software allows you to access shared folders, backup settings, and configuration tools. (The Control Center software requires Windows XP or Vista.) Shared Folders are the primary way of organizing files, music, photos, or videos and sharing them with other people. By default there are the five public preconfigured folders: Backup, Documents, Music, Photos, and Videos. These shared folders are accessible by anyone on the local network, and if password protected, can also be accessed remotely.

User accounts can be created on the HP Media Vault for enhanced security and to provide remote file access. Security is increased on shared folders by requiring passwords and setting read/write permissions for each user.

The HP Media Vault can also be utilized as an iTunes Music server, which will aggregate iTunes libraries from the systems on the local network and make one complete library with all music and playlists available to all iTunes clients. When enabled on a PC, the iTunes library on the PC is periodically polled to discover newly added music or videos. When new media is discovered, the files are copied to the iTunes library on the HP Media Vault where they are added to the aggregated iTunes library. (Note that only music files that are not DRM-protected can be streamed from the Media Vault.)

What's in the Box
HP Media Vault, power cable/AC adapter, Ethernet cable, software installation disc, printed setup poster

Product Description
The Media Vault mv2120 gives you remote access to your files when you're away from home, automatic backups, media streaming across your home network, a photo sharing Web site, and expandable storage. This quietly operating network-attached storage supports 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet and both wired and wireless networking. Back up and share data and media across your home network, automatically back up important files Back up the media vault's contents to an external hard disk and store in a separate location Remotely access files and applications from any Internet-connected PC Stream media files to your home entertainment center or PCs on your network Share photos and files with friends and colleagues by creating a photo Web site on the media vault, you can also give visitors permission to add their own files Marvell SOC Processor 128MB DDR2 DRAM Memory 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) RJ45 Ethernet Network Support Compatibility - Windows XP or more-recent Microsoft operating system Dimensions - Width 5.47 x Height 5.37 x Depth 9.62


Customer Reviews:   Read 19 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars Does what it says   August 18, 2008
M. Moreland (Dallas, TX USA)
I bought this product to store HD videos from my Sony HDD camera. It was SO EASY to setup and begin using. I have had no issues at all with the device. It is very quiet and transferring files (via wireless notebooks) is pretty snappy. I haven't had to use it yet, but one of the reasons I purchased HP was my experience with the responsiveness of their support team on my HP all-in-one 4250.


5 out of 5 stars Plug N Play and go...   August 8, 2008
D. Baker (South Bay, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I had been looking at other "NAS" devices, and had been waiting for the Ximeta NetDisk Home whenever they finally came out. I finally got tired of waiting, and found this little thing. My main requirements were NAS (not direct attached) and RAID 1. This has it all.

Plugged it in turned it on. Went to my PC to load the software, and forgot my CD drive was busted. Decided to browse the network anyway and see what I could see, and there it was, ready and waiting for me to copy files to it. I had been worried about my PC hard drive failing, and losing all my pictures, but got them backed up right away. (Oh, by the way, the Media Vault does have Gig Ethernet, so just upgraded my switch to Gig, and now planning to upgrade my PC.)

Once I fixed my CD, I loaded the software, and was able to setup automatic backups of my PC to the Media Vault. You can setup various situations: everytime I change a file on my PC, or only once a week for example. You can keep multiple previous versions which I don't need.

The Media Vault only comes with one drive, so to setup RAID 1 I had bought a second drive. Now came the time to add the second drive (keeping my fingers crossed). Worked like a champ: turn off the MV, open the case, drop the second drive in, push in (no need to worry about cables), turn it back on. Go to the software control center, click the button for RAID 1, and it's done.

I have both Vista and XP clients that connect to it. There were a few unusual issues from Vista when trying to manage the settings on the MV, but no problems with file copies/transfers/backups.

Haven't yet setup iTunes on it (it somehow integrates into your iTunes), nor used it for Windows Media Center, so will have further testing to do.

But for now I'm suitably impressed with this box.



5 out of 5 stars HP MV2120 Media Vault   July 31, 2008
M. Plaag (New Egypt, NJ)
Easy to hookup out of the box. Setup to the network went well. I have not used it yet for media so I don't know about the speed. I have also bought an additional hard drive to take advantage of the raid ability. It can be put in any room, noise is not an issue.


2 out of 5 stars Easy to setup, but can't make it work as I want   July 29, 2008
G. Boston (New York, NY)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful

I found this extremely easy to set up. As close to plug and play as you get. However, I am unhappy with it and plan to get rid of it. I simply wnated a networked storage device to clear my hard drive of photos and music. The iTunes aggregator grabbed all of the music (although it took a long time), but rather than store it in one folder, it create 7 or 8 different folders in a very complicated file tree. If I try to organize it, it re-aggregates and i get duplicates. Trying to turn off aggregation does not work. Support, while very friendly, was useless. After 2-3 calls, their answer was to check online forums for a solution. I really want to like the product, but it is just not working for me.


5 out of 5 stars I love this very simple backup solution   July 24, 2008
Steve Frazier (Seattle)
I purchased this to tame an increasingly jumbled set of backups that I had hacked together on my home network (4 pc's on the network, backed up to various internal drives, external hard drives, etc....everything was backed up but it was getting out of control).

All I'm using it for right now is backup (not media serving) but it's super-simple:

1. Plug drive into router and turn on power (1 minute).
2. Load software onto the first computer you want to backup (3 or 4 minutes).
3. Find the files/folders/drives you want to backup and assign them a backup location, press "start" (3 or 4 minutes).
4. Repeat on each computer in the network.

One small annoyance that I've seen mentioned elsewhere -- the HP software pops up and asks to search for updates, but there are no updates to be found. Should be smarter than that...

So: works as advertised. Simple to use. No headaches so far.