HP Media Vault

HP Media Vault is a line of home printer and file servers from Hewlett-Packard that run a Linux-based operating system.

First Generation
The Media Vault's processor is a Broadcom BCM4785 MIPS-based system-on-a-chip running Linux and BusyBox v1.00-pre2 based firmware. It has 64 megabytes of RAM, one Gigabit Ethernet interface, and three USB 2.0 ports.

The capacity of the device may be expanded using the empty drive bay which can house an off-the-shelf Serial ATA hard drive. The maximum expanded capacity of MV1 (first-generation) devices is approximately 1.2TB due to memory limitations.

One of the advantages of the system is that if the primary drive is lost (which includes some system software which works in conjunction with the firmware) the system can be restored onto a replacement SATA hard drive using HP's nasrecovery software.

Since the device supports standard communications protocols (listed below), it can be accessed by Windows, Linux, Mac, and any other OS that supports the needed protocols.

Protocols

 * CIFS
 * DAAP (only by user customization)
 * DLNA
 * FTP
 * HTTP
 * NFS
 * Telnet (disabled by default)

Second Generation
The second generation of the MediaVault products is powered by an ARM9 Marvell Orion processor, and has 128MB of RAM. It has 1 Gigabit network connector, and 2 USB 2.0 ports. There are 2 internal disk bays which support any off the shelf SATA hard drive up to 1TB in size.

Support
Lee Devlin was the hardware architect for the HP Media Vault and he maintains an unofficial support site for the device. The site includes information on hard drive replacement, restoring a previous snapshot of your pc, photos of the device internals as well as setting up a Firefly/iTunes Experimental server amongst many other articles.

There was also a Yahoo! group that offered support.