Digital Trends Reviews the Linksys NSLU2 NAS

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/review3656.html' target='_blank'>http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/review3656.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"If you’re looking for a simple out of the box NAS solution, the Linksys NSLU2 is a good all around contender. Novices will appreciate the easy default setup, while pros will benefit from the extensive open source initiative surrounding “The Slug.” However, limited supported capacities and only 2 USB ports make other offerings very attractive options if you don’t want to void the warranty."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/digital-trends-linksys-nas.gif" /><br /><br />This looks like a decent, if not overly impressive, NAS. I really like the concept of NAS drives, but they never seem to live up to my expectations. I purchased a Maxtor NAS drive a little over a year ago, and it basically gets used for backups and not much else. One of the biggest problems is the speed - it's 100 megabit, and working with files on it is slow. Worse, because it's so slow, having it be the primary source of files is intolerable. While I love the idea of having all my media on a central NAS drive and having each PC access it, the reality is that editing digital media stored on a NAS is a painful experience. <br /><br />At CES this year I talked to several NAS companies and asked why gigabit connections weren't more commonplace - their response was that gigabit didn't improve speed by any significant margin, the bottlenecks were related to file systems, etc. If that's the case, then NAS drives are going to be slow for a long time to come. Do you have a NAS drive? How do you use it?

[Damion Chaplin]

I also have the Maxtor NAS, with a One-Touch connected to it, giving me 400MB of network storage. The speed is pretty slow, so you definitely can't use it like it were an external drive locally connected. It's not really meant for use as a 'hard drive' though, it really is 'Network-Attached Storage', and that's what I use it for - storage. I store my entire MP3 collection (soon to be WMA lossless :wink: ), my ripped DVDs and recorded TV shows. I also use it as a backup for my important graphics files. Just about the only thing I don't have on it is my photo collection. The speed is fast enough to stream the media from the drive, but if I want to work with any of it, I copy it to my local hard drive first, edit, then replace the file on the NAS.

[The Yaz]

I installed this model on my network about three months ago. I wanted to have a central location for my family's music and photo collections.

In my household we have four mp3 players and two digital cameras. Each of the mp3 players are synced to a seperate computer, so I didn't want to have to remember which computer had what albums installed. I also didn't want to setup a shared directory since I would have to leave the computer on all of the time and open it up to possible attack through the cable connection.

I installed a 200GB Seagate in a usb 2.0 enclosure to the Linksys NAS. The setup is not as easy as they lead you to believe. The NAS uses a proprietary file system so you need to format any hard drive with their software to work with it. You cannot remove the drive and connect it directly to another computer. Flash drives are the exception. You can use any flash drive in the position 1 slot.

Also the default IP address is not listed in any of their printed materials in the box. I had to call tech support to have them inform me that the address is in the .pdf file on the driver cd. I have a wireless router and a wired router with a print server built in on my network so conflict were sure to abound.

Once I got the setup to work, I've been pleased with it. The NAS is fast enough to stream music to all four computers at the same time (probably from the 8mb cache on the hard drive). I backup the files from the NAS to a second hard drive on my primary computer monthly.

There is additional features offered with this NAS including remote internet access, but I do not have a need for that at this time.

It does what it advertises. I just feel that companies selling these network products need to come up with address ranges to keep their products from conflicting with other products. I know enough about IP addresses to fix it myself. The average consumer does not, and this linksys model would probably not be for them.

Steve 8)

[sundown]

I'm really disappointed in the NAS offerings so far and I don't understand why it's so hard to make a NAS device. Maybe I'm not understanding the technology but isn't a NAS device almost like a file server on a LAN, only without the extra functionality? Why do most only allow FAT or FAT32 file systems? All I need is a hard drive with an ethernet port running at least 100 Mb for sharing files across my tiny home network. It seems like one of these devices should work for me but reviews for these products are typically terrible. I don't want to build a full-fledged home server I just want a device that shares hd space without the need for a host computer to be one.

And come to think of it, how come ethernet print servers aren't more common and cheap now? I guess it's coming but soooo slow.

[Jason Dunn]

Why do most only allow FAT or FAT32 file systems?

Because they're all based on Linux, and Microsoft doesn't have an NFTS solution for Linux - or maybe they do, and none of the vendors want to pay for it. But I believe that's the reason - every time I've asked these vendors for NFTS support to allow files bigger than 4GB, they always say it's not possible. :?

[klinux]

Why do most only allow FAT or FAT32 file systems?

Because FAT/FAT32 is the only file system that the Windows, OS X, and *nix (Linux, UNIX, BSD) can both read and write to!