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: It is worth a try .... And not for all..
Summary: 3 Stars
This is truly and sound product If you are looking for speed of access to your drives this one is not for you. It is a snap to set up and had it running in minutes, connected to two 160g external maxtor's. I am running Win XP on a high end P4 system Threading Processor. Down side this device was it required me to format the drives so juggling of current data was needed. I am running a Linksys home network and all devices were compatible. Data transfer is in my opinion slow for a USB device on the 100 Meg transfer. I moved 120g of data on the USB in about 20 min. On this device it was over 2 hours... And do not expect to access the other drive while you're moving large amounts of data. I would rate the transfer as fast a USB 1 device... If that fast... This is truly a good device and allows for sharing. But don't jump in thinking it is fast a a USB 2 device. Plus when you move high volumes on data it will slow down your Internet surfing since the data is traveling on your home network through the router to get to the drives... I think Linksys will see a lot of these devices returned if people are expecting USB 2 speeds and not expecting the Drive to be formatted and not compatible with your PC when direct plugging it into your PC USB. IT can only be read through the Linksys controller.. Spend your money wisely....Customer Review: Great functionality, very poor Tech Support
Summary: 4 Stars
I enjoy the network storage link and its ability to allow me to access the 120G Western Digital drive from anywhere in my network. The first NSLU2 I purchased was defective and had to be returned. The defective unit was unable to maintain a connection to the USB drive and backups would cancel prematurely. Also, the "Administrative" functionality was not available through the web interface. It is worth noting that the default user name is: "admin" and the default password is: "admin". Please note that the Tech Support for this product was effectively useless. The Tech Support rep seemed to completely ignore what I was describing and asked questions remotely or un-related to the problem. At one point the Tech Support rep told me he had to refer to some documentation and fell completely silent. After 10 or so minutes he hung up. I found the Tech Service provided by LinkSys/Cisco to be completely unacceptable leaving me to wonder if this poor service is a new corporate standard as I see several complaints similar to mine. I never believed it could be so bad until I experienced it for myself. I don't understand why LinkSys/Cisco wastes their resources running such a useless Tech Support org.
So far the second NSLU2 unit I received works properly and I am very happy with the functionality it provides.
Customer Review: Setup not for novices
Summary: 2 Stars
I received the Network Storage Link (NLS) today and tried to set it up following Linksys' instructions. Their setup program could not locate the unit. I logged into my router and saw that the unit was connected with its default IP address (192.168.1.77) but I couldn't ping it. I suspected this IP address was the problem and configured the router to always assign an IP address of 192.168.0.xx to the Linksys device. After rebooting the NLS, it still had its default IP address. So then I connected it directly to my computer and used its built-in web page to change its configuration by first connecting to 192.168.1.77 and then changing the IP address by hand.
As others have noted, the problem was that the NLS was shipped from the factory with DHCP turned off. At least in my home office its default static IP address is not on the same subnet. Once I changed it everything worked fine. Knowing that you need to do this, much less how to do it, should not be expected of the average home user.
So far so good now, at least. I've also read the other reviews about persistent problems after the NLS is setup and running. I'm using it with an iomega 1 TB USB drive (yes it had to be reformatted first). I'll update this review in a couple of months with how the NLS works on a day to day basis.
Customer Review: Create users at your own risk
Summary: 2 Stars
I managed to set it up without difficulty and backed up my data but I realized that that data was accessible to everyone connected to the network so I made a mental note that I would need to explore its access control mechanisms sometime. I got back to this a few days later and I created a user using their web interface. Once I did this I could no longer map any directory on the hard-drive connected to this device onto my PC. Everytime I tried to access the device I was asked to provide login credentials and they never worked!
Unfortunately there was some gap between the time I created a user on the Linksys router and the time I got around to using it so the connection between user creation and the problems that created were not at all apparent to me and I wasted one Saturday before I figured out that I was better off not trying to create users on this device.
The issue may well be a problem with Vista since I was able to connect to the Linksys using another laptop while the user still existed. I should ideally try and experiment some more but I am too stressed out to try that again - maybe someone else could try that. However this post should serve as a warning to Linksys NSLU2 owners attempting to use some of the "advanced" features of this device.
Customer Review: Overall good, documentation could be improved
Summary: 4 Stars
I've had the NSLU2 for about a month. The first thing I did was to upgrade the firmware, which ended up being more painful than I thought... After downloading the latest firmware and starting the upgrade, the NSLU2 got stuck into a state where it said that the upgrade was in progress and I couldn't reboot. Stayed like this overnight. In the morning, I called LinkSys support. I happen not to have any PC's at home, only Macs, and LinkSys phone line doesn't support Macs. Doh. Anyway, they told me to reset and try again. It worked.
Other than that the device is working as expected. I plugged a Seagate Barracuda 200G using an external USB enclosure, no issues at all.
The documentation is a bit terse w.r.t accounts and groups. I'm a bit annoyed about the "guest" account having access to the main shared partition. It doesn't seem to fit my home usage at all, where I want the main partition to be mountable by all authenticated users belonging to a certain group (e.g. my family) , "guest" *not* included.
Finally, a tip: if you're going to use "rsync" to backup files from a desktop/laptop onto an SMB partition mounted from the NSUL2, you might want to use the "-modify-window" option of rsync. Without it, I found that rsync would copy files over and over again.