The HP Media Vault Mv2010: Protect and Share Your Data

Data is very important to everyone in our fast paced world. More people own computers now then ever before and often times they have loads of personal data, music files, videos, and various other data that you store on your computer. Well as you all know data can easily be erased, either by a simple accidental deletion or by a computer melt down. Well if you want to make sure that your files are protected then you need to buy the HP Media Vault mv2010.

Why the HP Media Vault? Well just a few highlights to get you started, it has very fast data transfers, an empty drive bay for your choice of SATA hard drives, had backup and restore software that comes with it, built in print server, and three USB ports for extra external hard drives.

The HP Media Vault mv2010 comes standard with a 300GB hard drive and one empty bay so you can add additional storage or setup a RAID 1 array. If you aren't sure what a RAID is you can read more about them and the types here that should give you some insight. The HP Media Vault mv2010 is ideal in my mind for the average home user who has a lot of media files that they want backed up and protected. The HP Media Vault mv2010 costs around $199 and then additional costs of the extra hard drives if you choose to add more.

The HP Media Vault mv2010 looks a lot like most of the HP desktop computers, it's kind of big and bulky, but it does a great job of storing data. The design is simple yet pleasing, and I like the lights on the front for network connectivity and activity. The HP Media Vault mv2010 includes 3 USB ports, one on the front and two on the back; also on the back is a gigabit Ethernet port and a power port. The HP Media Vault mv2010 has a built in print server so you can network up to three USB printers using the HP Media Vault mv2010 or you can use these USB ports to add additional drive space with external hard drives.

Like I said before you get one empty drive bay that you can put any size SATA hard drive in and you can either setup a RAID 1 which just makes a copy of the other hard drive so if one fails you can put in a new one and no data is lost because you have two copies, then the new hard drive will get a copy of all the data as well. This way the only way to lose your data is if both hard drives fail at the same time, which is pretty unlikely.

I would go in depth on installation and configuration of the device but it would take ten pages, so how about you just read the install guide here.

So the good about the HP Media Vault mv2010 is the customizability of the device. You can add additional hard drive space up to 1.2 TB of space using either a SATA hard drive or external hard drives. You can network the device and with the easy to use software that comes with the product you can easily backup your system and store all of your media files and share them with other PC's on your home network. You can setup a RAID 1 for redundancy of your data so that if one hard drive fails the other still has the data, and then when you replace the broken drive it will get the data written to it and again create the redundancy and protect your data.

The only downsides to the HP Media Vault mv2010 is that some software firewalls make installation difficult and it can be a real pain to work around it. Some people might think the ability to only setup a RAID 1 is a downfall but I don't see this but will list it anyway.

There you have it if you want a media storage device that can hold loads of data and comes with backup software, great speeds, and redundancy to protect your data and media files then the HP Media Vault mv2010 is just what you need.