> Hi all
>
> Short of building one from a dedicated Linux box (or a Drobo which is prohibitively expensive for me) - can anyone recommend a decent NAS USB device?
>
> I've had a Netgear NSLU2 for about 18 months now and fine though it is, it is beginning to try my patience. In particular:
Hi Rob,
Did you mean Linksys NSLU2 aka the "Slug"? My Slug caused me pain
recently when a Debian Etch to Lenny upgrade caused it to stop booting
(orange power LED, green network LED, frozen). I managed to recover by
re-flash using the new Debian Lenny installer.
> 1) Access is slow. I was copying 45Gb recently and it went more than twice as quickly if I bypassed the NSLU2.
I have found copying with scp slow (even with compression -c). I
believe this to be the caused by the low CPU power and encryption
overhead. Using samba/smbmount I was able to quadruple the transfer
speed to approx 5Mb/sec. I am using WD MyBook's with 8Mb cache. It's
over a home LAN so security isn't a concern.
> 2) The NSLU2 insists on an ext3 partition - which is fine - but if I wanted to encrypt the drive - the only workaround is to write a 100Gb encrypted file and use that as a container.
>
I have a feeling that would try your patience even more but I'd be
interested in how well it performs.
> I suspect 2) might be a sticking point and might well mean a dedicated Linux box - but is there anything out there (known to work well with Linux) that simply allows an external USB HDD to be accessed via a (cabled) network. I've seen them as cheap as ?30 on Amazon but write ups are poor (only one user at a time etc).
If you want to use encryption for lots of things then I would avoid a
dedicated solution and source an old Pentium III 1Ghz tower PC with
plenty of RAM. Try FreeNAS and Debian on it? FreeNAS can work with USB
HDDs but I'm not sure of the encryption support.
http://freenas.org/
Cheers,
Im
