Updated 12/16/2008: 1.5 TB drives now work; JBOD changed to RAID 0
The MvixBox is a moderately-priced two-bay BYOD NAS with an assortment of media and web services.
It is based on a StorLink SL3516 processor with only 64 MB of RAM and 8 MB of flash. The single 10/100/1000 Ethernet port does not support jumbo frames. Two drives up to 1.5 TB in capacity can be configured in RAID 0 and RAID 1.
Power consumption is 17 W and there is no idle disk spin down mode or programmable shutdown and startup. Fan and drive noise is moderate, meaning you can hear the device in a quiet room.
The two USB 2.0 ports support external storage expansion, USB printers and push-button file copy from flash or USB drives.
CIFS/SMB, AFP and NFS network file systems are supported, and files can also be accessed via HTTP, FTP and SSH. UPnP AV and iTunes media servers are available as well as USB print server.
Scheduled backups for networked clients can be done from the MvixBox without running a backup application on the client. Push-button copy to disk from USB flash or disk drives is supported. But there is no ability to perform scheduled backups of the NAS folders.
Performance is not the MvixBox’ strong suit, with RAID 1 writes with a gigabit LAN connection averaging 7.6 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 1 GB and RAID 1 reads averaging 8.4 MB/s. This ranks the Mvixbox second-to-last for RAID 1 writes and last for RAID 1 reads among all 2 drive NASes in our Charts.