Fileserver up and running
by Volker Weber
This is the Linksys NSLU2 with two 5400 rpm Samsung SV1604N hiding behind the HP 1200 printer. All of the data has been copied to the disks, the more important stuff is on both spindles and the old original still sits on the old server. The firmware is upgraded to Unslung. Time to install some packages, especially mt-daapd.
Comments
so what make are the disk enclosures ? TIA
John, this enclosure is pretty standard. Two metal plates, four plastic tubes, eight thumbscrews. The mesh is on three sides. The forth side has two Firewire, one USB, one power supply sockets and the on/off switch. It is sold under different brands. Mine have "Substance" and "Metal Gear Box" printed on the side. Here is one without the Firewire ports.
Looks like a very interesting new "toy"... ;)
Please forgive my ignorance, I had a quick glance at the LinkSys page but have to ask, what is it?
I mean, I know my computer can work as a file server but how is this item supposed to be classified?
Can we look at it as stripped-down computer which runs it's OS from firmware (opensource/linux based) and is customized as ftp, samba or what else, server that can be remotely controlled and administrated from a terminal?
Wouldn't a Mac-Mini offer much more with the same sort of foot-print?
If the latter is the case, is it only a matter of price or is there something else that I am missing here?
BTW, where do you usually buy you stuff?
Pieterjan, yes, a Mac Mini could do the same thing. It would probably be quite a bit faster and have more capabilities. However it is not meant to be run as a headless device. It wants a screen, a keyboard and a mouse. You can switch away from them but it will still display messages on the screen that you can't see.
The NSLU2 is a headless appliance that runs on Linux, which it boots from flash memory. You control it via a lightweight web server and a number of configuration pages, much like an internet access router. It is basically a Samba server for up to two external USB drives. Replacing the firmware gives me more options. It is now also my daap-Server (read: It looks like a remote iTunes).
Of course the NSLU2 is not only quiet, but completely silent (not counting the drives). And I could buy seven of them for one Mac Mini.
Christian, I usually buy at Zimmermann Electronic here in Darmstadt (I strongly believe in "buy local", which means I pay up to 10% more to support local dealers). They also have a web store. This one however I bought from City-PC, also located in the area. I ordered through their web store and had the device delivered (without shipping) to the local store in Darmstadt.
Pieterjan, it's a Network Attached Stroage device, but the stoage comes from USB drives that you plug in. There's some great info here: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
Out of the box it is adminstered through a web browser, and basically has a SAMBA server on it. No physical moving parts in the device, so solid state.
Is the USB2 connection fast enough? I guess would be, that a 100MBit LAN would outperform the throughput of the USB devices? So how does it compare to a NAS (basically the same setup, but Serial ATA or RAID). Is there a firewire solution too?
(Lots of questions)
:-) stw
USB2 is 480 MBit, Firewire is 400 or 800 MBit, Ethernet (here) is 100 MBit. They all outperform the device itself. I am not seeing more than 4 MBytes/s on write operations. Have not looked at read throughput yet. It looks like the machine is CPU-bound and not I/O-bound. At least it is not bound by the USB connection. Read the review behind the enclosure link and they are getting results in the 30 MByte/s range.
Could you get the drives to automatically spin down if they haven't been in use for a while? The NSLU2's power consumption probably is low anyway.
My experiences with Samsung drives are really good. Especially compared to IBM/ Hitachi. I owned three drives that all died after two or three years.
I think the harddisk enclosure is an ICY BOX IB350U.
Isn't it?
Have you had any heat issues with the Metal Gear boxes? I tried one of
those a few weeks ago with a 250-GB drive in it, and if I started writing
data to the drive, after a couple of minutes I would get a scsi error (which
the sbp2 linux driver kind of chokes on -- the journal file gets messed up,
it remounts the file system read-only on you, pretty much game over).
The box sure was cool looking, but was not cool temperature-wise (kind
of a redundant statement). I eventually had to return it and get a different
box with a built-in fan (Venus DS3). I suppose it could have been firmware
related or cable related or electronics related, but whatever it was, I couldn't
get it to work.
Just wondering if you've had any such problems.
-Eric
No such problems. It depends on the drive you are using. The Samsung drives are running at 5400 and never heat up too much.
l have 4 of these metal gear box enclosures. 2 of them set up in the exact same way as Volker's (and l thought l was being original ;-)
Two of them were running maxtor 250 gig drives, and they are noisy and get truly smoking hot.
The others are running Samsung 160 gig 8 meg cache spinpoint drives and they are silent and run very cool.
Max transfer is only about 10 gig per hour.
The sata/usb connection enclosure is much smaller than the usb only enclosure for some reason.
The only drives that will spin down are the IBM/Hitachi drives, and only after you have connected them to your PC and run the feature tool to enable APM (advanced power management) http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Main/FAQ (question 21).
My recommendation is either do as Volker does and use 5400 RPM drives, or use IBM/Hitachi drives and enable APM.
