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: 2 TB on an NSLU2
Summary: 5 Stars
I thought it is about time that I wrote a review for this product since I have used it for half a year successfully. First of all, as soon as I got it, I did a web search and downloaded the latest official firmware V2.3R63. This would allow me to use FAT/NTFS without having the NSLU2 reformat it in it's native format. There are several web sites that gives tips on how to do this. I first tried this with a USB flash and it worked successfully. I could attach to this using everything from Debian Linux to win98 to Vista! Awesome, next step. I bought a SimpleDrive 1 TB which I believe has a hitachi drive and attached it and it didn't work. I then connected this drive to my win98SE machine and after some finagling with the device manager, I set it up as a removable hard drive and a message popped up that it needed to be reformatted. So I reformatted it as Fat32 and reconnected it back to the NSLU2 and this worked. After a few months and a good sale, I bought another SimpleDrive, did the same as above, and now I am running with 2 TB. I can disconnect my drives and hook them up directly to USB 2.0 and they work with all my machines. On the NSLU2, I can access them using any of the aforementioned operating systems with ease.
New Update;
For those guys who haven't converted to the SLUG firmware variants, I have had pretty good success with the v2.3R76 forever Beta Firmware since I installed it right after writing the original review. Works great with my NTFS formatted drive and have used the Windows 7 image backup with a file size of 80 Gb. It took a while but it worked. But then what do you expect with Fast Ethernet. Now with the GuruPlug and Gbit Ethernet ......
Newer Update;
Well tried Guruplug it it got really toasty and went to the spare parts bin in less than a month so my NSLU2 is still kicking. For a while it got relegated to PBX use with asterisk 1.4 but I moved up in the world to Pogoplug Multimedia Sharing Device so I could use FreePBX. Except for that one incident, really love plug type computers and will find uses with my NSLU2.
Customer Review: Horrible Tech Support
Summary: 3 Stars
The other reviewers covered the features of this product, so I'll focus on setup and tech support.
I have intermediate hardware and software skills but am somewhat of a networking novice. I was able to set up a Linksys wireless network a few weeks ago without a glitch. So I got confident, bought this little box and a Western Digital external hard drive, and went to work.
Setup went smoothly, but the directions on how to map a drive once the device is installed are either vague or wrong, depending on your operating system (I have Windows XP) (by "map a drive," I mean assign a drive letter to the external hard drive so that I can easily store files on it). To learn how to map my drive to a letter (Z:), I spent FIVE hours on the phone with four tech support representatives in Banglore India. They had *no idea* how to map a drive (powering off equipment won't do it. Changing your encryption won't either. Yet they had me do both on several occasions). And while their command of English was fine, their accents were heavy. When I finally threw my hands into the air in frustration my drive still wasn't mapped and my network settings had been destroyed. It took me two hours just to get the network up and running again. Then I called back to get some advice on how to direct my browser to a particular port setting (answer: add ":XXXX" to the end of your typed in URL, where "XXXX" is your custom port setting). They had no idea how to do this either, despite the fact that using custom ports greatly enhances the product's security.
Google saved the day -- there are plenty of websites out there that will answer your configuration questions. A few searches and I was up and running. Everything now works as intended. I should have started there in the first place, but I naively thought tech support would help.
Bottom line: If you're going to buy this AND you're a networking novice, PRINT OUT THE ADOBE MANUAL that's available here and have it handy throughout the process. Review it thoroughly. And rely on tech support only as a last resort. They'll hurt you more than help you and take hours of your time doing so.
Customer Review: Great Product for Basic Needs
Summary: 4 Stars
I paired this up with two Cintre USB hard disk enclosures <ASIN:B000ANT9OA>. The Cintre enclosures plus internal hard disks run about the same cost as an off the shelf external USB drive, however I can upgrade in the future for substially less cost by buying just an internal drive.
I use the NSLU2 for data backup and shared data access of smaller single files on my home network. Consequently despite it's marginally slow access time it's ideal for my purposes. For small file access the NSLU2 is plenty fast. For working with large quantities of MP3s or photos at one time I wouldn't bother. Or at least be prepared to wait. Definitely not suitable as a large enterprise solution but great for small home networks. I think this is true of most low cost networked solutions so not a huge detriment in my book.
The device was pretty trivial to setup and get running. I had some confusion with setting up the shares and getting the basic security working the way I wanted, but it wasn't a big deal. I'm dropping one star from 5 for the hassle. If you don't have special security needs or anything setup is a breeze. Just follow the bouncing ball per the Linksys configuration disk.
If you're a computer freak like I am the NSLU2 firmware is released under GPL from Linksys' website. There are also several open source projects around the NSLU2 if you're not happy with the Linksys firmware. Including some nice UPnP software from Twonky if you're looking at a home UPnP multi-media solution. The bundled UPnP support is acceptable however.
I replaced a full blown PC file server with the NSLU2. I love the extremely tiny size and greatly reduced power requirements. I can run this thing on a UPS far longer than my old PC server. Though automated shutdown in the event of low UPS battery power isn't included. This would be a nice add on feature if you have a UPS that sends network events. Arguably useless if your server shuts down and quits writing to the disk though. I shared a photo of this product with an AA battery in the shot so you can get an idea of scale.
All in a perfect device for my needs.
Customer Review: Nice product, but be aware of the issues.
Summary: 4 Stars
[...]
This little linux based device basicly works. It does everything it says. It also has a lot more potencial if you want to hack it. It can be used as web server, ftp server, etc.
The setup for it was not easy for me. First I wanted to upgrate the firmware to R63 so it will recongnize NTFS, but the update failed due to "not enough space" error. I called the help desk and the first guy asked me to use another PC and the second guy kept telling me my hard drive is the problem. In the end, I looked up the knowledge base in linksys web and found the specific solution for this problem. This is why the downloaded firmware package contains "EraseAll.exe" in addition to the bin file.
The second thing I wanted to do is to set it up on a network that is not accessable for default address 192.168.1.77. Since I don't have 192.168.1.0 network, I had to change the router and restart my PC to connect to the NSLU2. After changed the address for NSLU2, I had to do change router setting and restart my router and PC again. I just wish the default is DHCP so I can look up its address with arp command easily.
I was expecting a slow down from my USB 2 connection. But the speed is enough for video viewing through 100mbs network card. My other machine has 10mbs and it is too slow for video viewing. For small file transfer, it works pretty well. But the problem is large file transfer as other reviewer said. I believe its processing speed is slower than the sustainable network speed and the buffer fills up on large file, therefore it bebomes a bottleneck itself.
The real problem I ran into is the same "network path no longer available" error in the middle of large file ( 6.6G ) transfer, as mentioned in Martin's review. The hard drive I have is Maxtor 80 GB personal storage 3100 External hard drive USB 2. This is definitely a show stopper that linksys should look into. I give it four stars because of this problem.
In general, it is nice concept and nice little product. I purchased it over D-link product DNS-120 because it handles NTFS with the upgrated firmware. D-link supports NTFS read only.
Customer Review: Too Much Trouble - Stay Away
Summary: 1 Stars
There are a lot of issues with this device. What I wanted was a low-power, quiet file share on my network for both my Windows XP and Mac. I did not want to use fat-32 because the last time I accidently nudged the firewire cable out of my Mac and the filesystem became corrupted (I was only reading from the drive to top it off) because fat-32 is easy to corrupt. I wanted to use my NTFS disk because that was already formatted and had lots of data on it. In order to do that I had to upgrade the firmware on the Linksys device (even though the box says it supports NTFS.) But in order to upgrade the firmware, you have to have a disk connected. So I connected a USB thumbdrive and was able to upgrade the firmware. When you access the webpage, all 100+ linksys devices are listed for downloading drivers/firmware. Why can't the device know which device it is? After all that, the NTFS disk was still not recognized because the README file is wrong -- NTFS is port 1 and not port 2 (you can only use one NTFS device.) In order to set up the device, you use some windows program that is supposed to find the device on your network. My computers are at 192.168.2.XXX and the devices sets up on 192.168.1.77. The program says that it found the linksys device, but none are listed in the device list. I had to reconfigure my IP to be on the 192.167.1.XXX subnet so the program would find it. During my first large scale transfer over the network (a whole 14 Gigs of mp3s) the device froze up half-way through the transfer. I can access it through the web-browser, but the status page half-loads and does not list the status of any of the devices. I tried to reset the device and it seemed to reboot, but I cannot access the device anymore. Also, there don't seem to be any power saving features for the disk drive - it is on all the time which is silly because I only use it a few hours a week. Perhaps this is a limitation of USB drives, but the linksys device doesn't allow you hotswap drives (except flashdrives.) Maybe I will flash the drive with an alternative linux distribution (search for "slug linux") and be able to do something with it.