HP Media Vault mv2010 (300GB)

Pros: you are warned

Cons: defective design

Summary: 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.