Cisco-Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2
by Linksys
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List Price: Buy Used: from $45.00 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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(Click here)
Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Cisco-Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2
Customer Review: Great Idea - Never Worked.
Summary: 1 Stars
Knowing the NSLU2 would reformat my drive didn't bother me but really never got the chance to find out how great this device could have been. For the second time in two weeks, a Linksys device did not work correctly out of the box. The orginal setup software 1.5 failed to recognize the Storage Link Device althought the device could be connected through the IP address. I was attempting to use the NSLU2 as a network backup drive attached to a new Maxtor 120 One Touch. Even though this was a new device - the packaging appeared to be be in unopened status, the device had been passworded, the usual "admin" would not work. After spending an hour on the phone, nothing worked, the representative did not seem that overall knowledgeable of this product. Much of the time was spent resetting the device for 20 seconds, no less the ten resets later I gave up on this universal fix. A very similiar circumstance happened two weeks ago when the Linksys wireless range extender failed to show a network link on the status lights even though there was a strong signal increase once I got the device working. Would not have affected performance but if the light is supposed to turn blue, shouldn't it? Is legendary "Liksys Service & Quality" a thing of the past?Customer Review: Work in Progress, but has potential
Summary: 2 Stars
This is definitely a product released before it has matured. The software is flaky and unpredictable and when the setup is successful I cannot maintain stable connections with the drive.
First, I had trouble setting up this device from a wireless connection. Only when I used a PC that is wired to the router & NSLU2 that I was able to do certain things like renaming the server.
Second, the built in software is very buggy and at many times does nothing when you press the save or create button. At other times I would lose connection with the device altogether and had to physically restart it- which takes an awful long time to boot up (1-2 minutes). Not a single operation I tried worked the first time I attempted it, so it was a very frustrating experince.
Now that I have things set up and running, I can't maintain a connection long enough to transfer large files. The connection keeps dropping off.
The silver lining, however, is that this is an inexpensive device and it runs Linux, which means someone eventually will hack it and create a better software. For now, this is definitely an 'early adopter' product with all the kinks and grieve you'd expect from a prototype or a beta version.
Customer Review: Cheap total Linux Server for the technically minded
Summary: 5 Stars
This unit is actually a very very small and cheap Linux Server with an ethernet port and two USB 2.0 ports. It's stock firmware supports sophisticated user management and backup utilities. You will need to purchase your own USB hard drives to plug into it, and currently you will need to upgrade to the latest stock firmware to be able to attach FAT32/NTFS (i.e. Windows) formatted drives to it. To get the full functionality the NSLU2 will need to format the drives to a Linux format (ext3) to manage sophisticated user quotas and access restrictions which FAT32 does not support. This restriction may be eased by some of the ongoing work in customising this little box since the Open Source community worked out how to improve the device.
Since the Tom's Networking article ([...]) a highly active community has formed which have taken it upon itself to customise this item with additional functionality such as iTune servers, mail servers, CVS servers etc, SSH, print servers, Fat32 support, bittorrent, apache, php, mysql, etc.
See [...] for the latest and greatest information on customising the NSLU2.
A very neat little box with great potential and solid community support!
Love it!
Customer Review: Beware of Windows Networking
Summary: 4 Stars
After reading the reviews here complaining of slow data transfer,
I was worried that the NSLU2 would be a loser. However, I really
needed a backup solution for my 5 PC home network, so and I went
ahead and bought a NSLU2 and a 250 GB Maxtor drive anyway.
The NSLU2 works quite well; with 4 out of 5 PCs it works great,
however, Windows networking is abominably slow on one of my
PCs. Data transfers are in the same range or even slower that
some of the other reviewers have mentioned. Running Knoppix (a
version of Linux that runs from a CD-ROM) on that
PC gives good network performance, it's just Windows (both
XP Home and XP Pro) that exhibit the problem; The other PCs
work quite well.
The same slow PC, a recent HP/AMD box with 1.25 GB of memory,
connecting with full-duplex 100 BaseT, also has performance
problems transferring files to other machines on the LAN, not
just the NSLU2. It's not noticable with small files, but
with 10GB to 20GB backup files, it's a real killer.
I've tweaking the network settings on the slow box, but nothing
I tried helps.
Customer Review: eventually got it working
Summary: 3 Stars
The NSLU2 is working okay for me now - once I bought a compatible USB 2.0 drive (Maxtor One Touch 250 GB). I also use a 128MB flash drive without problems.
I first tried two inexpensive USB drive enclosures and various smaller drives, but I couldn't get the NSLU2 to recognize the drives (probably due to incompatible USB enclosure interfaces; BTW, these do work when plugged into a PC USB port).
Accessing both the flash drive and hard drive via the built-in web server worked as expected.
However, the uPNP feature only worked from some of my Windows XP systems. I could manually mount the network drives on each PC and easily copy files, though it is slow.
The administration console in the web server works okay, but could be much more user friendly. It would help if it gave any indication why it couldn't recognize a drive (or in one case why it couldn't finish formatting a drive).
All in all, the NSLU2 meets my needs. I use the flash drives to share smaller files and for staging to a later backup. I only turn on the 250 GB drive when backing up or sharing larger files (but this requires restarting the NSLU2).