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Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2 | List Price: $190.00
Discount Price: $47.00
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Brand: Linksys
Binding: Electronics
Warranty: 2 years warranty
Features: - Connects USB 1.1 or 2.0 hard drives and flash drives directly to your network
- Share music, video, or data files with managed access by user name or group
- Integrated file server -- access your files from the Internet
- Built-in disk utilities -- format, backup, and scandisk
- Connects directly to a 10/100 Ethernet network for throughput up to 200 Mbps
The little Linux that could! [Posted on 2008-04-04]
I won't bother to review the NSLU2 as a music server or criticise it because it uses the ext3 file system. I don't really care that Linksys customer support sucks - all customer support for technical stuff like this is pretty abysmal. Instead I will concentrate on what it does well and really IS - a low power, Linux computer with good IO support via USB and an active user community. This product allows hands on experience with a compact (by necessity) but fairly modern and full-featured version of Linux (2.4.21). The limited main memory (32 megabytes) and flash for boot (8 megabytes) enforces a discipline of compactness missing in the normal desktop with 1 gigabyte of main memory and a terabyte of disk storage.
The Linksys WRT54GL wireless router is possibly the only other device out there with such an active user group. It, however, has only half the main memory and no USB ports. As a hackable Linux based router it is superb but it is less useful as a general purpose Linux box.
The USB implementation is what makes the NSLU2 so expandable. One may add hubs and hang all sorts of USB periperals such as RS232 converters, etc. There are also easily accessible pinouts internally for I2C that is supported by the kernel. This is a boon for those of us who want to buy cheap transducer chips from Digikey and Mouser and want to hook them up to a reasonably powerful computer for processing and storage.
The UBW (Universal Bit Whacker), available from SparkFun.com for less than $20, provides an inexpensive way to add 20 general purpose IO lines and 10 bit AD conversion. This tiny board contains a PIC micrcontroller that provides a USB connection and has firmware that makes it appear to the NSLU2 as an RS232 port. To use it one simply opens a standard COM232 port and writes ascii character strings. The PIC firmware is open source and completely modifiable using free tools provided by Microchip (the mfg. of the PIC).
There is also a ProLogix USB to GPIB controller available for $150 that uses a FTDI USB to RS232 chip internally. This allows an NSLU2 in a remote location to control all sorts of legacy GPIB equipment with full telnet or ssh access. The NSLU2 idles at about 4 watts not including a hard drive. By using flash memory sticks it is possible to have a remote monitoring setup running from solar panels with the NSLU2 firing up telemetry equipment as needed to make measurements and then powering them back down. The low power draw of the NSLU2 allows it to run continuously
One can solder on a small IC made by Microchip to boot the NSLU2 when power is applied. This is a real benefit since most of the commercial embedded Linux devices I have encountered require someone to manually restart the unit after power is lost and restored. If you intend to have one of these at a remote location for telemetry you certainly don't want to drive fifty miles over fire roads just because power failed for ten minutes!
While it is possible to upgrade to Linux 2.6 and a Debian distro, I haven't found it necessary yet. Instead I immediately "unslung" to version 6.10 beta so I can have room to store new programs. "Unslinging" moves most of the operating system files from ram to a USB storage device. I'm using a 256 megabyte flash memory stick and still have 90% free. After that simple upgrade I was able to use the ipkg program to download and install all sorts of precompiled packages directly over the web. My first step was to get full featured versions of bash and busybox so that the user interface would be a bit more full featured. There are thousands of programs available. An embarrassment of riches.
My next step is to install the toolchain on a desktop Linux box so I can write and compile programs for the NSLU2.
The NSLU2 is a beautiful piece of equipment in the much the same way that my Marlin Glenfield Model 60 is a beautiful rifle. The lines are clean and the design is minimalist. True, it's just a mass produced 22 caliber plinker, but it's cheap to buy, cheap to use, nice to handle and for most of my shooting it's fine. If you're not out for bear but just want to harass the occasional rat and gopher or maybe shoot a few wine bottles to get them ready for recycling, it's just the ticket.
What makes the NSLU2 head and shoulders above just about everything else out there is the active support from the people at www.nslu2-linux.org as well as an active yahoo bulletin board. The collective efforts of these folks have transformed a little plastic box not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes from a mediocre and rather buggy little file server into "the little engine that could!" My thanks to everyone out there who has shown that the "tragedy of the commons" is not a universal rule. If you've been thinking about learning Linux the "real" way - from the command line - and you don't want to have to wade through billions of bytes of fluff and cruft, here's the baby for you. Under the hood Linux remains a powerful and fairly simple operating system capable of doing useful work in a small memory footprint on a slow, by today's standards, processor.
Have fun!
Need more stars! [Posted on 2008-04-05]
What a great little box. NAS on the cheap. Hooked it up, connected two USB drives to it and fired up the CD. OK, since my subnet was set up different than the default on the NSLU2, I had to direct-connect my laptop first, but so what. After that, it was full speed ahead.
Within twenty minutes, the first drive was formatted and the second one, a 500gb WD, was on its way. Some time after that and I was backing up everything I had onto those drives.
What I like is to have one central repostitory for the entire family's store of music, photos and videos. This thing streams all with no issues. So, so easy to setup and maintain. True 'nuff, I had some initial issues with backup, but they were all attributed my dang router. Once solved, this thing is amazing. Plus, there's tons o' mods available all over the internet. One powerful little box.
Once I'm done here, I'll have two 500gb drives on it - one backing up to the other. I'll have one for the families stuff, and one for backup, just in case. Just imagine never having to explain to mom why her precious photos are now gone cause her laptop died. Or to Jr why all his 'legally obtained' music is lost due to him deleting the folder from his machine. So worth the money.
get one before they're gone [Posted on 2008-04-09]
1. Service from the provider was good. Product arrived in a few days with no issues.
2. Product itself is still a great deal, due to all the third party work done by developers. You can use it as a print server, web server, ftp server, etc., albeit a bit slow. Product has been discontinued though, so might get hard to find one soon.
Was a great buy for me.
Good Economical Network Storage [Posted on 2008-04-12]
Easy to set up. The main drawback I have found is that when power goes off, even briefly, the NSLU2 must be manually powered up after power is restored.
This unit provides for very inexpensive network storage. If you are a careful shopper, you can buy 2 500GB USB dives for <$300 and have a Terra Byte of storage for <$400. Note that drives used with the NSLU2 do not use Windows formatting. They must be specially formatted for the NSLU2, destroying any data already on them.Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2
Great low power backup NAS drive for running 24x7 [Posted on 2008-05-07]
I got this unit to run as a backup NAS drive and it is perfectly suitable for this purpose, especially since I keep it running 24x7 (it uses very little power).
I have this currently attached to a 320GB WD drive (in a Rosewill RX353-S enclosure) and have been using it for a few days now. The speed is more than sufficient for my use - especially since the backups are run at night.
Note that the drive is formatted as EXT3 - this gives the best performance compared to others. Also, I find that there are a few "windows drivers" available that can read EXT3 drives - which is great in case the NLSU2 fails, I will still have access to the files from Windows. (much better than NAS drives based on ReiserFS - did not any good Windows drivers for those).(There is always the LiveCD approach to recovery in any case).
Here are some metrics for those who are interested.
Power Consumption (based on actual measurements using P3):
NSLU2 + 320GB External Drive = 13W (or 9.522kWh monthly), about $1.58 per month in electricity.
A barebones AMD Sempron based file server = 76W (or 55.384kWh monthly), about $9.20 per month in electricity costs.
(Electricity costs includes generation, transmission and applicable fees and taxes)
Transfer Speed:
I did a simple test transfering a 4571MB iso file and recorded the time it took (all within the same local 100Mbs network).
1) PC to another PC - 8 mins (34.38GB/hr)
2) PC to a laptop via wireless-G - 34 mins (8.84GB/hr)
3) PC to NLSU2 - 20 mins (13.7GB/hr)
4) PC to *turbo* NLSU2 - 17 mins (16.13GB/hr)
Note *turbo* in (4) indicates the results after I modified the hardware (removed resistor) to increase clock speed (voids warrantee). Also after I increased the clock speed, I noticed that the web browser interface loads much faster (very noticable compared to changes in transfer speeds).
I also tested accessing the files such as playback of MP3, DIVX (HD), MPEG2, WMD-HD (720 and 1080) and DVD iso files as well as viewing of photos etc. All worked fine.
The current setup is configured with firmware release 2.3 R63. This is the official latest firmware. The con is that this firmware has not been officially updated since 2005 although there are unofficial beta release floating around (i.e. R76).
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