Cisco-Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2
by Linksys
|
List Price: Our Price: $45.00 You Save: $145.00 (76%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
|---|
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Cisco-Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2
Customer Review: The little Linux that could!
Summary: 5 Stars
I won't bother to review the NSLU2 as a music server or criticise it because it uses the ext3 file system. I don't really care that Linksys customer support sucks - all customer support for technical stuff like this is pretty abysmal. Instead I will concentrate on what it does well and really IS - a low power, Linux computer with good IO support via USB and an active user community. This product allows hands on experience with a compact (by necessity) but fairly modern and full-featured version of Linux (2.4.21). The limited main memory (32 megabytes) and flash for boot (8 megabytes) enforces a discipline of compactness missing in the normal desktop with 1 gigabyte of main memory and a terabyte of disk storage.
The Linksys WRT54GL wireless router is possibly the only other device out there with such an active user group. It, however, has only half the main memory and no USB ports. As a hackable Linux based router it is superb but it is less useful as a general purpose Linux box.
The USB implementation is what makes the NSLU2 so expandable. One may add hubs and hang all sorts of USB periperals such as RS232 converters, etc. There are also easily accessible pinouts internally for I2C that is supported by the kernel. This is a boon for those of us who want to buy cheap transducer chips from Digikey and Mouser and want to hook them up to a reasonably powerful computer for processing and storage.
The UBW (Universal Bit Whacker), available from SparkFun.com for less than $20, provides an inexpensive way to add 20 general purpose IO lines and 10 bit AD conversion. This tiny board contains a PIC micrcontroller that provides a USB connection and has firmware that makes it appear to the NSLU2 as an RS232 port. To use it one simply opens a standard COM232 port and writes ascii character strings. The PIC firmware is open source and completely modifiable using free tools provided by Microchip (the mfg. of the PIC).
There is also a ProLogix USB to GPIB controller available for $150 that uses a FTDI USB to RS232 chip internally. This allows an NSLU2 in a remote location to control all sorts of legacy GPIB equipment with full telnet or ssh access. The NSLU2 idles at about 4 watts not including a hard drive. By using flash memory sticks it is possible to have a remote monitoring setup running from solar panels with the NSLU2 firing up telemetry equipment as needed to make measurements and then powering them back down. The low power draw of the NSLU2 allows it to run continuously
One can solder on a small IC made by Microchip to boot the NSLU2 when power is applied. This is a real benefit since most of the commercial embedded Linux devices I have encountered require someone to manually restart the unit after power is lost and restored. If you intend to have one of these at a remote location for telemetry you certainly don't want to drive fifty miles over fire roads just because power failed for ten minutes!
While it is possible to upgrade to Linux 2.6 and a Debian distro, I haven't found it necessary yet. Instead I immediately "unslung" to version 6.10 beta so I can have room to store new programs. "Unslinging" moves most of the operating system files from ram to a USB storage device. I'm using a 256 megabyte flash memory stick and still have 90% free. After that simple upgrade I was able to use the ipkg program to download and install all sorts of precompiled packages directly over the web. My first step was to get full featured versions of bash and busybox so that the user interface would be a bit more full featured. There are thousands of programs available. An embarrassment of riches.
My next step is to install the toolchain on a desktop Linux box so I can write and compile programs for the NSLU2.
The NSLU2 is a beautiful piece of equipment in the much the same way that my Marlin Glenfield Model 60 is a beautiful rifle. The lines are clean and the design is minimalist. True, it's just a mass produced 22 caliber plinker, but it's cheap to buy, cheap to use, nice to handle and for most of my shooting it's fine. If you're not out for bear but just want to harass the occasional rat and gopher or maybe shoot a few wine bottles to get them ready for recycling, it's just the ticket.
What makes the NSLU2 head and shoulders above just about everything else out there is the active support from the people at www.nslu2-linux.org as well as an active yahoo bulletin board. The collective efforts of these folks have transformed a little plastic box not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes from a mediocre and rather buggy little file server into "the little engine that could!" My thanks to everyone out there who has shown that the "tragedy of the commons" is not a universal rule. If you've been thinking about learning Linux the "real" way - from the command line - and you don't want to have to wade through billions of bytes of fluff and cruft, here's the baby for you. Under the hood Linux remains a powerful and fairly simple operating system capable of doing useful work in a small memory footprint on a slow, by today's standards, processor.
Have fun!
Customer Review: It Has its Place...
Summary: 4 Stars
I got the NSLU2 to handle storage of my iTunes music and digital photo and video data. I have this all on external drives as all my computers are laptops with small drives and I liked the idea of not having the data drives directly attached to my machine. The NSLU2, is a compact LINUX-based file server (using SAMBA) with FTP support. Which means, I don't have to install any additional software on my client machines.
The NSLU2 was easy to set up. In about a 1/2 hour I had the NLSU2 setup, two 250GB hard drives attached, and configured for my network. After a long wait to have the hard drives formatted, I was able to access shares from my Windows XP systems.
The accompanying documentation wasn't too helpful, but it was pretty obvious where things got plugged in and the web-based admin screens were for the most part, easy to use though somewhat klutzy in navigation. Where the documentation failed was in explaining how things were set up, for example, the shares as they relate to drives (there were some default shares set up, but I didn't quite understand why there were there and if they actually were needed. It also took some digging and exploring to understand how to do cleanup - remove files and shares. It seemed like the best documentation came from reading the user forums.
It's backup functionality is pretty good, especially if you have two NSLU2s on your network. You can schedule backups from one system to another. For smaller environments, you can just use one unit with two drives and clone drive 1 to drive 2 as a backup. I'll leave it up to you to decide if this is good or not.
The NSLU2 has a fairly small footprint. However, when you take into account that you will need storage space for the attached power supply, your external hard drives and there power supplies, it can get cluttered. I would recommend looking for USB drive enclosures that you can stack (take a look at the Vantec NexStar GX as one possibility), to help minimize the crowding. You may still have to deal with the hard drive heating issue in this scenario, so to avoid any nasty comments... think this out carefully for your situation. Just keep in mind, this won't fit in a small space.
I found it interesting that there is a thriving developer community supporting alternative firmwares that can be installed on the NSLU2. In many cases, this was to address features lacking / malfunctioning features in the Linksys released code. I looked at this since some of the user community was saying the currently released firmware had some file transfer issues with Windows and the solution was to downrev which removed the FTP capabilities.
Performance wasn't much of an issue. You are moving data across ethernet, along with other traffic. So it is not fast. For simple data storage needs / small number of users this may be acceptable. It worked fine for my iTunes client to access music files to install on my iPods and for downloading photos from my digital cameras. I came across firmware alternatives that allowed you to make the NSLU2 a media server though I don't know how good it actually is.
I can't really comment on the security features, as I don't need them. It is being used by only two people. However, I could not see this being used in a business environment unless for simple workgroup solutions.
I guess, my final criticism is its price. If you factor in the cost of an external drive (whether you get one already in an eclosure, or you get the pieces separately) you could probably do better price wise with a alternative NAS solutions that have the drive already built in.
Customer Review: A great little "roll your own" NAS solution!
Summary: 5 Stars
If you're looking at adding more storage to your computer network, there exist many solutions that let you do so. The Linksys NSLU2 is just another method of doing so, but it has an interesting twist. Unlike many solutions that bundle their own drives, the NSLU2 features two USB ports to which you can attach external USB hard drives of almost any size or type. This means you can pick the types of hard drives that best fit your needs. You can also pick the brand of drive that you like the best.
Linksys suggests using Maxtor drives with the NSLU2. I wouldn't give a Maxtor drive to my worst enemy. I selected a LaCie "Porsche" designed enclosure with a 250GB Samsung drive inside to start with. Later on, I added a Western Digital "My Book" 250GB hard drive. Both work well, but to head off any potential problems, I hooked both drives up to a computer and deleted the manufacturer supplied partitions, so the NSLU2 would be starting with a "clean slate". While configuring the unit, I set it to use a static IP address (a good idea, so the unit doesn't "move around" on your network).
After getting the drives formatted, I was able to quickly start storing things on them. Connecting to the drives from a Windows or Macintosh computer is easy to do. Once connected, I started moving files across to the device. It never hiccuped once, and I transferred everything from huge (32+ GB) NTBackup files down to smaller files, like Word documents. I transferred a little over 140GB worth of backup files and another 2GB or so of smaller files in a few hours time.
Being as it is built around a miniature Linux operating system, alternative firmware solutions have been written to extend the functionality of the NSLU2 beyond what Linksys provides. Even though the Linksys firmware isn't lacking in options for file access, you may wish to do things that aren't provided, such as sharing music over your network.
So far I am very impressed with the NSLU2. It seems to be very stable, reasonably fast and it took well to being used by several computers at once. The only slowdown I noticed with several computers transferring data to it at once was with the web interface. The pages took a few seconds to fully appear. I have not yet had to reboot or reset it. Later on I may connect it to a small UPS to keep it running during power outages.
I have only a few complaints--the Linksys web interface suffers in places from poor localization and doesn't always render properly. Some of the settings are strangely placed and you are prompted for the administration password more than once in some cases. I also would have liked to see two more USB ports provided, so as to allow for attachment or more drives.
All things considered, I think the NSLU2 is a great little solution and certainly deserves your consideration if you're looking at adding storage to your network. It may not be geared for the less experienced computer user, but this product will most likely delight people who want to customize their network attached storage solution and don't mind tinkering with it a little to do so.
Customer Review: Undocumented feature: It can be used as a personal webserver
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been using this for past 1 week. It is a great product. I have learned to work with it rather than against it. Here are some observations that actually add exceptional value to the product. I have discovered some undocumented features too. 1. You can actually use it as a webserver! I am running one, though for personal use. To do this you need to put the files in the public area on the NSLU2, and using webhop like feature from DynDNS, you can map the index.html to a web address.
2. If the above feature is used and the html files are put into the restricted area, it will webserve, but will need password and user name. I serve my family photo site using this method!
3. The file systems seems to be Linux based. I used Acronis True Image 7.0 for backup of the USB drive. It indicated 3 partitions. Two of them were ext3 and one Linux swap! Acronis complained about some errors in the Linux partition. Looks like some propriatory stuff in there.
4. The device features really needs to be explored carefully before deployment and making any judgement call. The features like user+group+password can be used for excellent security. I have multiple pseudo users setup with private directories categorized according to the data, like music, videos, photos, downloads etc. Then I setup most of the actual users without private directories and provided them with selective permission to use the data. This adds to security since I can bump off any user without having to move files or data.
5. Documentation is lacking details and examples. In fact it is inadequate. But this does not make the device any less valuable. I had to explore and experiment with the device to make full use of it.
6. I noticed a number of reviews complaining about the data transfer speed. It is quite true that the speed is slower than USB2.0. In fact it will be slower! USB2.0 is designed for 480 Mbps data rates, while this and any other NAS will be limited by the network speed. NSLU2 is rated at 100 Mbps. This is the most common network speed today. This makes it approximately 5x slower than a direct USB2.0 connection. But, it is not any slower than if you were to share a folder in windows and access it from another computer.
7. I would also like to warn all the users to be careful not to run this device (or any other personal server for that matter) on the default port 80 if you plan to access it over the internet, since every port-scanner on the planet will find you and target you for hacker activity. It is better to change the port to something like 8000, 8081, or any other obscure number HIGHER than 1024 which port-scanners do not generally target. You can use the webhop feature on DynDNS.org in conjunction with cloaking to hide the actual address from normal viewing.
Customer Review: Does exactly what it promises. Great product.
Summary: 5 Stars
I don't quite get the negative reviews. I am not sure how these folks where able to write their reviews when they were so obviously unable to read when it comes to the print in both the Quickstart sheet and the Manual stating that this product is not compatible with windows and that it needs to format your hard drive. Yes, I know, Linksys did a firmware upgrade in which it attempted to also give access to windows formatted drives, but I am quite sure that that was never meant as the main operating drive, and they took the support back out of the following firmware upgrades, because people tried to use it as a full-time solution, and then where trashing this product after it didn't run trouble free. Go figure!!!
Once you format your external drive (the device formats it to Linux based EXT3), this thing is ROCK SOLID and doesn't waver, no matter how much stuff you copy/move. I also didn't have an issue with it getting hot; I wonder if it's worse for folks that lay it flat. I used the little stand it came with and have it upright. Last but not least there is the so-called issue of the lack of speed when used in a wifi environment. Yes, the speed sucks, but that is because you (the user) chose to use wifi for convenience rather then a much higher performance cabled Ethernet solution. There is a cost for not having wires everywhere... and that cost is called speed.
To not have to wait forever when putting all my music and photos on the attached drive, I downloaded a free EXT format driver for windows (after the drive formatting was done, just google and you'll find multiple download possibilities), powered down the link and hooked the drive back up directly to my laptop. After a much faster data write, I hooked it back up to the link and restarted that. Now I can read the data from everywhere, and for media streaming the available speed is just fine.
That said, I think I will upgrade my wifi router pretty soon anyway. 54Mbit on my newest notebook is only half of what the link can do, and never mind my old g card in my ancient laptop that connects only with 11Mbits...
A new generation N (vs. the old G) router with the corresponding notebook receiver cards will eventually fully utilize the duplex 100Mbit this device is able to do; of course that will set me back about 100 bucks extra, but there is no hurry. It might be only 50 bucks in another 6 months or so.
All in all, especially if you actually read up on it before hand, this was a near perfect consumer experience for me. The Link delivers exactly what it promises. PERIOD.