The HP MediaVault and Me

I recently added a HP Media Vault into my networking setup, with mixed results.

The Media Vault is a Network-Attached Storage device (NAS) that provides an always-on place to store data, supporting NFS, SMB, FTP, and even HTTP connections. In theory, every laptop on my network can use it for wireless storage, allowing each laptop to offload non-essential files, like our huge iTunes library. Given that I have Mac, Linux, and Windows machines to deal with, cross-platform compatibility is somewhat necessary.

My main goal was to point iTunes to use the Media Vault as the primary library location, which would let me reclaim 45 GB of disk space on my laptop.

In practice, this doesn’t work. Not. At. All.

It’s not that it can’t work. The setup to stream media over wireless is fairly easy. The drives can be automounted so the iTunes Library files always point to the right location. And the Media Vault works quite well as network storage for archives and nightly backups, a serious point in its favor.

But if you aren’t using Windows Media Center (which I’m not), then the streaming functions of the Media Vault don’t apply, and you’re left with the restrictions around transferring large files over wireless to watch movies. Video is the real trouble spot; audio is actually fine. Playback isn’t initially compromised by wireless network speeds, but it eventually fails. Badly.

Unfortunately, video is kinda important in this scenario. So you’re left with the previous options of splitting apart your iTunes Library, or continuously culling and managing your disk space. Which, in turn, is totally counterproductive.

See, one of the things I like about applications like the iLife suite is that they abstract filenames and location away from you. I just wish they could take it a step further, and abstract the physical filesystems used (like ZFS) so that you don’t have to worry about where the file is, it just goes and gets it for you. Local caching of frequently-accessed content, intelligent offloading onto network resources…

(Just think of what .Mac could be as part of a Apple ZFS strategy in this case. Yowza.)

The problem here is really one of expectations; I wanted one thing, but the Media Vault is something different. It looks to do what it does pretty well. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what I really wanted, so I have mixed feelings about it.

So, to sum up: I got a NAS. It’s cool. I thought I was going to use it for live media storage, but it turns out it’s only really good for backups and archives, so that’s what I use it for.

The end.