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This is not explained anywhere in the sales hype (including at Amazon -- shame on you).2) The SETUP does not work per their instructions. 1) The Linksys Storage link does not allow WINDOWS formatted hard drives to be hooked in. That means you LOSE all data on the hard drive you plan to network. The hard drive will need formatting, and if not formatted in advance it does not recognize the hard drive. I was on the phone with a tech for 1:40 to sort out how to find the formatting instructions, as the provided information does NOT include any help.3) EXTREMELY poor documentation.
It's a small and very flexible addition to any network. This little thing can do a lot. I would recommend this to anyone that knows networking and Linux at lease a little bit. Even if you don't, it's still a good simple network storage device.
I've gotten mine in a state I've read about in forums where files are still there, but I can't modify anything since it's all read-only and permissions are messed up. I've had this product for a couple months. I had the disadvantage of using it with a 750G drive, which it's not supported for, but this wasn't advertised anywhere I saw. Because.When doing a copy operation to the disk (from windows)., DO NOT CANCEL THE COPY. Take the hint, get something else. Apparently Linksys support stops at 2 250G drives attached.
I'm going to try to return mine, and buy a simpler NAS with it's own hard-drive. In short, it is a pain to use, but it works if you're good at hacking on things. Requires a format of the entire disk to fix, but that doesn't work either. Some things don't work for me, for example now I cannot format the disk through the web interface. Why would I need to do that. I don't want to have to hack on it to keep it running.This is not sold by Linksys anymore.
It's not worth it.
It took me a number of hours to transfer about 200GB of data back on to my drives, but once complete, I found the SLUG to be more than capable of serving up my files to any of my three laptops around the house.Then I started playing with the FTP server and web access. This configuration was quite troublesome and the drives were constantly dropping data and requiring frequent re-booting. The first thing I did was update the firmware which was relatively straightforward though it did require me to use the much feared LINKSYS "Erase All" program. I use a free DNS service to alleviate any problems associated with the Dynamic IP provided by my ISP.
Since the NAS claims to support standard NFTS formatted USB drives, I just plugged in my drives which I'd been using with Windows XP. I bought the NSLU2 because it was a cheap and relatively easy way to use my existing external drives in an NAS configuration. Adding users to the NSLU2 was straight forward but be aware that once you do this, you'll have to add each of your Window's users as NSLU2 users in order to access your mapped drives. My technical experience is moderate and I'm sure someone who is more experienced could do much more with this little NAS. After a little research I realized that I would be far better served reformatting the drives as EXT2.
The FTP works well and the HTTP interface is excellent if you need to retrieve data while away from home. It gets four stars instead of five because it's a challenge to set up for someone with very little experience. However, I had no problems with the update and got the little NAS up and running relatively quickly. All said, after a few hours (days). I backed up my data and used the NSLU2 to format the drives and then started again.
After doing this, I found the NSLU2's performance to be excellent. of tinkering, I'm very satisfied with my NSLU2 as a home based NAS that I occasionally access remotely. However, once it gets going, it will stream music or video, serve up files, and generally is a great home NAS.
I managed to set it up without difficulty and backed up my data but I realized that that data was accessible to everyone connected to the network so I made a mental note that I would need to explore its access control mechanisms sometime. Everytime I tried to access the device I was asked to provide login credentials and they never worked.Unfortunately there was some gap between the time I created a user on the Linksys router and the time I got around to using it so the connection between user creation and the problems that created were not at all apparent to me and I wasted one Saturday before I figured out that I was better off not trying to create users on this device.The issue may well be a problem with Vista since I was able to connect to the Linksys using another laptop while the user still existed. I got back to this a few days later and I created a user using their web interface. Once I did this I could no longer map any directory on the hard-drive connected to this device onto my PC. I should ideally try and experiment some more but I am too stressed out to try that again - maybe someone else could try that. However this post should serve as a warning to Linksys NSLU2 owners attempting to use some of the "advanced" features of this device.
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