Customer Reviews

Cisco-Linksys 1 TB Media Hub with LCD

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Everything you read about the features and setup of the LinkSys by Cisco NMH410 MediaHub is true: it is very easy to set up and to configure other computers and it does offer a browser-based way to access your media.

The problem is that most of it doesn't work. The lion's share of the software is broken, buggy, or simply incapable of doing what it is supposed to be doing. A quick glance at the support forums will confirm this, and unfortunately it appears to be endemic for many of the models of MediaHub, not just the NMH410. The problems that you will encounter are:

1) The Media Hub Online tool will not "see" all of your files. They will be physically visible when you use a computer to browse folders, but they will not properly share or index, even if they meet the stringent requirements (no long names, no special characters in the names, must be in one of the supported file formats, etc.).
2) The Hub will continually rebuild its index of your files. In other words, "now you see some files, now you don't". It regularly "forgets" what's on the hub and starts over, one by one, re-reading every file. You have no control over when it does this.
3) The Media Hub will not respond when it is busy. I can play an album that I manually launched from the folder, but if I try to open the File Browser, look at Configuration, or even just click a bit too fast browsing the media, the MediaHub Online will throw me "MediaHub is Disconnected or not Responding" errors and stop taking any commands. I have to randomly try again and hope to get lucky and get in.
4) The website for Remote Sharing (in other words, logging in to your device through the Internet from another location) regularly has Server Timeouts. You never know when it will let you in or when you will just get a dead white page.
5) Some features reboot the hub without warning. You choose the option, it says, "Resetting the MediaHub" and the next thing you know, the browser interface fails, the hub loses all of its indexes, and it starts all over again crawling through your files and not responding to your clicks.

It's very distressing to see aggressive releases of software and firmware updates, whose release notes claim to have solved these problems...only to find that all the "fixed in this version" problems are still there. If these issues really were considered fixed by the company, then Linksys/Cisco's problems are much larger--they may need to consider a recall. Thus far, the only features that truly work are the ability to view files and folders on a computer and the optional computer backup program (which should only be used for files and not as a full system backup).

It should tell you a lot that there are actually two pieces of software embedded in this hub: the Linksys by Cisco software, and a third party tool called "Twonky Media Server". Twonky is better, but still not what this product promises above. Both have really bizarre problems that should never have made it to the sales floor.

I'm reaching the point of complete surrender. I managed to get indirectly engaged with the hardware/software development team and have offered them access to my hub to try whatever it takes to solve the problem.

As of October 19, 2009, my unit was used for the Beta and the new Firmware was released. If you own an NMH and are having the above problems, you should give it a try. Unfortunately for me, the best I have seen with this new firmware is that the fixes are spotty: almost seems to mostly-work one day, then it's back to completely acting up the next. The cruel part is that one day I'll discover an amazing new feature or two that I'd never seen before...and the next day it's gone again. Content appears and disappears, and the system is always rebuilding itself. I have spent many, many hours on and off support calls struggling with this device and I'm sorry I bought it. It's November 19th, 2009, and my NMH410 Media Hub is now back in the original packaging waiting to go out the door back to LinkSys. I've lost over 4 months trying to get this to work and I can't recommend it to anyone.

I was mislead by the claim that it would provide family and friends the capability to view the pictures thru web access. Basically it does provide the view capability along with delete and change. This product does not provide ANY access setting so that you safely share pictures and files with family and friends. It is always full access or no access at all.

The friends and family get the same access to the files as you would get as the owner/administrator.

How can one share the files with family and friends without making sure they cannot be modified or deleted?

Also the web access is only free for one year. Cisco may charge for web access after the first year of free access

I've been using this for about a month now, and I'm very happy with the purchase. I added a second 1TB drive to it, so I now have 2TBs of storage on my home network. It holds my iTunes library, my collection of movies (ripped from DVD for watching on my Archos), my Amazon-on-demand library, and lots of other stuff, with a bunch of room to spare!

I had tried other network drives in the past, and was very dissatisfied with their performance. This one responds very well to a wireless connection, and with my wired desktop PC it's whippy-fast!

Finally there's a network drive that performs well enough to actually USE.

The Hub works incredibly well! I have had no issues with it.

The only 'problem' so far, is that the web based tool for viewing videos doesn't support all formats, so some videos won't play. But I don't use the web tool/interface much at all, so its not that big of a deal.

I have been using this since Jan 09. It has worked flawlessly. I have it hardwire connected at 1Gb to my home LAN. It streams music, files, backups all home PCs - all without any problems. I use this to stream my music files from Rhapsody via my Cisco wireless home audio config.

Pros: Backups, file access, speed, ease of setup. Adding additional 1TB hard drive for either additional storage space or RAID was a cinch.

Cons: None really. I wouldn't mind being able to have public and private folders for friends/family to have access to the drive - but this is only a minor issue.

I have tried NAS solutions from HP, Buffalo, and others - this is the only one that was easy to setup AND consistently provided good data access speeds.

I really like this NAS. It was very easy to setup and very easy to use. The web based media player is a great feature which easily let me queue up music from any web browser in my house. The remote access feature just simply rocks! I live in California and during a recent trip to the East coast I was able to easily login and stream music across the country without any buffer delays (my friends back East didn't believe I was streaming music from my NAS in my house back in California). I bought a second 1TB WD green technology drive and was able to easily use the configuration page to configure raid for data protection. This is by far the best NAS I've ever purchased and used!

I bought this to replace an HP Media Vault that died prematurely.

The setup and software from Cisco is much better. I was able to install the software on each computer in the house and they all back up to the Media Hub.

I downloaded a Linksys firmware update (after being prompted to do so) and now own a very expensive decoration that doesn't function as a media hub. If you go to the Linksys product support page for this product, you'll see there are many others experiencing the same problem and Linksys has done nothing to fix the problem after several months. Although I'm within the warranty, the only option is to replace one defective unit with another. In short, stay away from this product -- Linksys hasn't fixed the kinks and has TERRIBLE customer support.

I chose this product because it had expandable storage and Gigabit Ethernet. The local network that this device sits on was hubbed by a 100MB/sec device so the Gig-E speed wasn't realized. I purchased this device so that I could backup a PC with 2 internal drives [~350GB total] and would have liked to use Vista's backup utility to create an image of these two drives. [Assumption] That's not possible because the device doesn't directly connect. It was not obvious -- how one might use Windows Backup/Restore utility to do file-level backups to this device, so I used the software that came with the device. This was OK because the files are stored on the device in a browsable directory tree that matches the original file-system layout on the device that was backed up. It took almost 30 hours to complete the backup of about 350GB. Would I make this purchase again? Probably, but I would also ensure that the network could run at Gigabit speed as well. Price wasn't the leading factor in the purchase, the network speed and ability to add additional storage was.

Purchased the Link Sys Terabyte server, aka Media Hub as soon as I saw the advertisement! Upon arrival, I added a second terabyte drive and then fired the system up. System installed flawlessly save for the Shadow Software on my 64 bit machine (BTW tried it again last night and it immediately loaded... go figure). Only complaint, I have to manually save my Nikon RAW files from my camera. Everything else works as advertised! So far, I'm very pleased with the units performance!