Cisco Linksys NMH410 Media hub review

Servers just got sexy. No really, they have. The Linksys by Cisco NMH410 Media Hub has got to be the most presentable media savvy server yet made.

Beautifully built, it has soft lines, blue lights and is whisper-quiet. While you can squirrel it away in a boot room, I suspect you'll be tempted to put it somewhere prominent, just to show it off.

Priced around £350, it's in many ways the poster boy of the new NAS generation, and typifies the shift from utilitarian tool to consumer desirable.

One obvious bind in running a media server is syncing it up with a PC that takes in the media in the first place. At its worst, this can involve tedious drag and dropping. The Linksys NMH solves this conundrum through a smart Media Importer app, which monitors designated folders and automatically updates the contents on the Hub when it detects changes.

A backup program is bundled. NTI Shadow will backup all files in the Documents folder, once an hour on default. A great safety net.

One glaring omission from the product is integrated BitTorrent support. This is a key attraction and not having it is a missed opportunity.

Remote access is free for the first year, ten dollars thereafter, yet it won't stream DRM-lashed content, and it's size and codec limited. In fact, it didn't work at all with a PSP.

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