Since I have some free cash from Acer Cashback, I went to BBC to buy a D-link 323 NAS (Network Attached Storage). I installed to it a new 740GB Samsung 32MB cache sata 3 and an old 320GB Seagate 16MB cache sata 3. By the way, Samsung is so genius that you need a software to run their disk into 16MB cache because it won’t follow its jumper.
First off, I loaded fun_plug. If you are not going to use raid or jbod, the right disk will be volume 1 and it is where you install fun_plug. And from there, you can put in a robust iTunes Server, a torrent client and many more. I might explore the UPNP media server and PS3 in the future.
You have to put cleanboot in it as well for the best way to shutdown your machine. Using the power button will render the an improper unmounting of drives and might corrupt precious data. You need to telnet or ssh and do a halt.
If you are already suffering from this:
# dmesg
EXT2-fs warning: mounting unchecked fs, running e2fsck is recommended |
Mount your drive into a Linux machine and do
e2fsck -f /dev/sde1 e2fsck -f /dev/sde4 |
If you don’t have linux, you can use a livecd like Ubuntu. Since the drive is already mounted, it is also practical to transfer old files this way because it will be faster than rely solely on gigabit network. From my experience, it will take about 4 hours to transfer 300GB of data on a gigabit network and just less than an hour in sata.
To save my drive from unwanted spinning and separate all these scripts from the data, I moved fun_plug into a usb. Good thing the Queensland government has given away their interactive tour in a 1Gb usb flash disk.
Not bad for a NAS because you can extend its functionality and the filesystem is not the proprietary out of this world Fat32 being used by a lot of pseudo NAS devices.
My current firmware is 1.04 and I have spent the whole Saturday until 5:00am Sunday doing this and finishing Season 3 of Beauty and the Geek with my wife.
Of course she is a beauty and I am a not a geek! =)