Linksys By Cisco Media Hub Home Entertainment Storage With 500 GB Drive,LCD And Flash Card Reader

If you want a simple and affordable media NAS, I would strongly recommend this one. It is easy to configure and reliable in use. It serves out files via the generic UPnP and DLNA protocols which are supported by a wide range of devices including games consoles such as the XBOX 360 and PS3. This facility is provided by the TwonkyMedia server software that comes pre-installed on the box, which automatically indexes files whenever they are added/changed and then serves them out. As this box is just running a cut-down version of Linux, it also has a Samba server which can be seen by Windows and Linux for simple reading and writing of files.

The included 500GB hard drive is a Western Digital Green drive, which is quiet and fast but more importantly has a very efficient low power consumption (quite important for a drive that might be left running a lot of the time). The box offers two standard RAID configurations if you want to add a second internal drive: RAID 0 (double the space) or RAID 1 (double the security). I bought a Samsung EcoGreen 500GB drive to run in RAID 1 - this was very easy to do. Just physically install the drive, boot up and choose RAID 1 from the web admin interace. It automatically synchronises the disks (which can take a couple of hours if the first disk is quite full) and that's it!

The server has relatively good read and write performance for a device of this type, but you have to remember that overall performance is constrained by the weakest link, which is not likely to be network bandwidth (assuming you have at least 54G wifi) or hard drive speed, but in this case the speed of the processor inside the box. The manufacturer claims it is capable of streaming multiple concurrent HD streams, which I can believe, but writing to the box does slow everything down, especially the web interface. It's pretty much unusable until the write operation has finished.

Which brings me on to my main criticism - the web interface itself, which on the face of it looks very pretty and stylish with its Flash animations. Navigation is easy and responsive and there's plenty of functionality for file management (move/rename/delete). However, I have never managed to successfully view a video clip (no matter how small) from within this interface directly. It starts pumping the data across, which is evident from the flashing activity LEDs on the back, but Windows Media Player never seems to start playing even after a couple of minutes of buffering. This isn't a problem for me, as I use my XBOX 360 or a Linux PC running 'boxee' as a client, but for anyone intending to access media this way I wouldn't advise it.

I really like the way this box is designed. It looks quite stylish and minimalist. It's compact and very quiet in operation, even during intensive disk operations. The built-in fan is virtually silent. The small LCD screen is suprisingly useful for checking the current status (how much disk space, how is it being used, etc) and for simple admin tasks like updating firmware, shutting down and so on. It's just a nice touch really.

This is a well-built quality NAS, but it's really more about the hardware and media server software than the client-side interface, which I just can't get to work properly. There are probably better media servers available, but I think this represents good value for money and a safe investment.

UPDATE - 22nd November 2009 - a new firmware update v3.18.15 has just resolved my problems with watching videos via the web interface. Videos now start playing almost immediately and will happily display in fullscreen mode with no lagging and good picture quality. Various other issues have been resolved by this update and the unit now feels generally more responsive, particulary when accessing the GUI at the same time as copying data onto it. If only the maximum data transfer rates were a bit better, I would now be happy to award this 5 stars.

Needed a place to store my ever increasing music, video and photo collection and be able to stream them to whatever device I want around the home and this fits the bill 100%.

Setup of the MediaHub was extremely painless, stick the CD in, follow the instructions, give your hub a password and a name, and away you go. As an extra challenge, I did the setup on a Windows7 64bit machine, and glad to report the setup worked fine with no blips. If it can handle this, then I have no doubt it's pretty robust and would work on all other flavours of Windows too.

The unit itself it very small (the pictures don't portray how compact this unit is), and looks very slick. The LCD on the front is very handy, giving status, how much diskspace is used, what type is content is using it up etc etc. it's easy to navigate, and has a timeout on the LCD backlight, so it turns off (optionally) after a period of inactivity, which is useful if the unit is only partially hidden, or lives in the living room.

The services the units provides is your basic SMB/Windows Filesharing, so it appears as a network share in Windows Explorer, so you can drag and drop media onto it. It's also got FTP (switched off by default), iTunes server, a DLNA 1.5 media service (for PS3/Noxon or any UPnP/DLNA client), it's also got remote access, meaning you can access your media remotely (however this is a subscription based service, only free for the first year), and I found this clumsy to setup.

The 2 functions this units primarily provides (for me at least) is the DLNA media streaming, and the backup features, both of these work exceptionally well, streaming flawlessly to my PS3 and my Noxon audio units, I tried it with the usual types of video media, (HD and SD) and DRM-free music (WMA/AAC and MP3), with no issues whatsoever either wired or wireless via my router. The backup works very well too, you need to install client software on your PC, and then a simple press of the button on the unit, will start an incremental file backup to the mediahub. You can also start the backup from the PC. The software provided is called NTI Shadow. (I have used NTI products for many years, and always found them exceptional, and whilst this bundled software is basic, what it does, it does perfectly).

Accessing the Mediahub itself is simplicity in itself, everything is browser based, and it uses Adobe Flash for the interface, it's slick and very responsive. I tried it using Internet Explorer 8 and Opera 10, and both worked without issue. You can browse and play your media directly from your web browser if you wish. I also found I could access the media directly from Windows Media Player 12 (on Win7), in the Other Libraries listing, and this worked very well (and is my preferred method of playing music on my PC). Of course you could also just access the media directly via the windows file share also.

The mediahub also has card reader slots (MS,CF,SD,XD) and a USB port on the front for easy importing of media. Simply plug your memory card (or USB flash or HDD drive), in, and the LCD will pop up with a prompt asking if you want to import your media. NO PC NECESSARY! I really like this. A small niggle, is the card reader supports most formats, but not Sony Memory Stick Duo, I needed to use a Memory Stick "chewing gum adapter" to fit the smaller Duo cards, but I had one around, so it's no huge deal.

The unit I have is 500GB, which is ample for my media, at least for the foreseeable future, however the harddrives are user upgradable, and take upto 2TB in size (2 of them), so you can have a 2TB mirror RAID for ultimate data protection, or I believe a 4TB striped RAID for ultimate capacity.

The unit does online firmware checking, both from the PC based flash interface, and also the LCD, so you know when there is a update out (there was for the unit I had), and the updating process is quick and painless.

My Pro/Con summary:

Pros:
Simple to import media from memory cards, straight from the units front panel user interface (no PC needed).
Silent (barely any noise)
LCD is really handy and serves a function rather than just displaying stats
Backup software works really well
Spare drive bay, allowing you to RAID additional drives.
Media Streaming works very well, simple to import media.
Worked without issue on Windows7 and non Internet Explorer web browsers (due to it being flash based).

Cons:
No MS Duo support
"Access Anywhere" was clumsy to setup, and is subscription based (1yr included $10/Year afterwards)

After reading the recent reports on the new Media hub and it's usage with the Wireless Music streams, I took the plunge and ordered the unit through Amazon. Setting up the hub was easy and my excitement grew when it was time to start transferring media files. Sadly that's where it all went wrong. The first issue I found was that the media hub ignores the local folder.jpg files for your albums. It uses its own method which cannot be disabled. Great if it gets it right.

A second issue, and perhaps the biggest, relates to Compilation/soundtracks albums. The media hub cannot understand that it's a compilation album and treats each track separately, so if you import a 20 track compilation album, you actually get 20 albums created with a single track in each album, it then attempts to find album art for each track, fails in most cases and displays a different image that is calculated depending on certain search criteria. So before long (Say 20 compilation albums) you can get 400, single track albums created with various unrecognisable Album art pictures.

So if this isn't a problem go ahead and buy it, it is in fact a great looking piece of kit, and I am disappointed that it's just not fit for purpose for my requirements.