Linksys Media Hub: Peace of Mind in a Box
Colin Dixon, Practice Manager, Broadband Media
March 19, 2009
As the designated IT person in my household I’m delighted to tell you about a new product from Linksys by Cisco: the Media Hub. This has made my life a lot easier, less stressful and given me some cool additional functionality as well. You could think of the Media Hub as simply NAS. But it’s a lot more than that. Let me explain.
Measuring just 4.5x7x6 (inches) you can locate the hub pretty much anywhere; I have mine sat on my desk. The install is easy: just run the setup software on your PC and follow the instructions to get the unit plugged into your network and powered up. Then you go to each of the PCs you want to use the device and install a small client. Again, this is very easy with the install automatically finding the hub and making smart decisions on what folders to monitor.
Once installation is complete the PCs automatically back themselves up without any intervention by the user. The only way the computer user will notice it’s even there is a short message that back up was completed. From now on any hard drive failures mean you’ve lost, at most, the last hours work.
In addition to this, the media hub collects, collates and makes available all of the media on the PCs connected to it. The PC software finds all the media on each computer and makes sure the media hub knows about it. From any PC you can access the pictures, movies and music that are available on the media hub. I can even do this from the TV through my PS3 (which required zero configuration to find and access the media hub). So, not only is all this media backed up, it’s also available 24x7 regardless of which computers are on or off.
I can also access the media hub remotely from anywhere I have an Internet connection. I said in a report on Place Shifting in 2007 that the Sling functionality would end up in other devices and here it is two years later in the Media Hub. All you have to do is register a unique name for the hub with Cisco and point your browser at their website and you have full access to all your media anywhere you may be.
It’s a little on the pricey side with the basic 500GB unit costing $300. But I’m comfortable recommending the basic model as it’s easy to add a second hard drive yourself if you need more storage. It’s also very quiet (my unit has a fan but it never seems to turn on) with me hardly noticing the unit is on.
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