The HP mv5150 Media Vault Pro is HP's refresh of its Linux-based Media Vault line. The attractive new enclosure takes its design cues from the troubled Windows Home Server-based Media Smart server. It is essentially a shorter version handling two drives. One is easily removable on a tool-less slide-out tray. The other drive also plugs into an internal backplane, but is not on a tray and requires removing four screws and a panel to access.

The mv5150 is the small-business version and there is also the mv2120 Media Vault aimed at home users. It comes with two drives for a total of 500 GB of storage and doesn't include the NTI Drive Backup "bare-metal" drive backup and online storage features of the mv5150.

Both models include NTI Shadow backup software for 10 Windows clients, Web-based Photosharing, UPnP Av / DLNA media and iTunes servers. Secure (HTTPS) remote file access is also supported with free and paid dynamic DNS services from TZO.

Both models run on a Marvell Orion processor and have 128 MB of RAM, supporting JBOD and RAID 1 modes (not hot-swappable). There is a 10/100/1000 Ethernet LAN port, but it doesn't support jumbo frames.

Performance is good, but not great, with 12.5 MByte/s average write speed with a gigabit LAN connection in JBOD mode for file sizes between 32 MB and 1 GB. RAID 1 write under the same conditions is slightly slower at 11.2 MByte/s.

Use the NAS Charts to run your own comparisons oe read the full review.

Tags: HP, NAS, RAID,

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