D-Link DSM-G600 lets you roll your own NAS
posted Oct 25th 2005 11:10AM
Networked hard drives may be all the rage right now, but they
tend to be a little overpriced — and don't do anything to leverage the investment you've already made in standalone
hard drives that might be piling up in your office. The D-Link DSM-G600 Network Storage Enclosure is one way to solve
that problem. The device looks a lot like a typical WiFi Access Point, and, in fact, can function as one when attached
to a wired router. But inside, it's got space for any 3.5-inch ATA/IDE drive. Just pop in a drive, and it's on your
network. But wait! There's more! (We always wanted to say that.) Unlike a lot of similar models, the DSM-G600 has two
USB ports on the back, which can be used to add more hard drives, giving you virtually unlimited networked storage (we
don't know whether you can add a hub, potentially chaining dozens of drives, but we'd love to give it a try). It has a
street price of about $170, which is less than you'd pay for most standalone NAS drives, and only a bit more than you'd
pay for some non-WiFi, non-USB-host enclosures.
[Via eHomeUpgrade]
that should be DSM-G600 ...not C600
the price is actually about $270...
That's really cool, this would make a good home server or even for very small businesses.
yeah, try around $270.00, not $170.00... and to think you had my hopes up.
#2 - I saw this for $170 at CompUSA this weekend, and almost bought it to go with the $100 250GB hard drive. Problem is, I can't find enough information on the Macintosh support... so many of these things say they support Mac, but only do SMB, which is sub-optimal. Anyone know if this one does AFP?
someone...let us know if you can, in fact, use a USB hub to utilize more external hard drives! This thing (potentially) ROCKS!
Commenters: $270?
No.
$170 as the article states.
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=332971&pfp=srch1
I think THIS (http://www.netgear.com/products/details/SC101.php) is a much better product. It can hold 2 3.5 inch drives and allows you to mirror the data between them. Saw it at Fry's yesterday for $119.
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=332971&pfp=srch1
As stated above, can be had at CompUSA for $170.
Also, the Netgear refered to by #7 is a SAN device and requires vendor proprietary software. Forget about cross platform support.
What formate are the drives it uses? As I have a mixed network, ex3 or FAT would be preferable...
#7: The netgear sc101 has been known to overheat (fanless), requires reformatting of drives to its own filesystem, and requires a PC driver to access the drive (hence it's a NDAS, not NAS).
I'm curious if the low price may indicate stock of revision A1...supposedly more buggy than the newer revision. Reviews like the following make me nervous about taking advantage of that low price: http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/D_Link_MediaLounge_DSM_G600_Wireless_G_Network_Storage_Enclosure___network_storage_server/4864-3382_16-31229975.html?ctype=msgid&messageSiteID=16&messageID=1471087&cval=1471087&tag=uolist
Bah.
No need. Just use NASLite:
http://www.serverelements.com.
Free, with any old box and drive you have lying around.
I just got one - it's $170 w/o a drive. I had purchased a Tritton wireless NAS - it fried the hard drive AFTER I had copied all my files to it!
The HD I installed didn't format like it was supposed to - calling tech support was useless. After I set up the networking, I hit the IP for the device and a "format hard drive" screen appeared. So, if you're having trouble getting it to work, it may be because it didn't format the HD when you turned it on. You can tell if it's formatted if you go to the "Status" tab from the main device home page (everything will be blank under Internal HD).
I just got one - it's $170 w/o a drive. I had purchased a Tritton wireless NAS - it fried the hard drive AFTER I had copied all my files to it!
The HD I installed didn't format like it was supposed to - calling tech support was useless. After I set up the networking, I hit the IP for the device and a "format hard drive" screen appeared. So, if you're having trouble getting it to work, it may be because it didn't format the HD when you turned it on. You can tell if it's formatted if you go to the "Status" tab from the main device home page (everything will be blank under Internal HD).
Oh - I forgot - make sure you buy the version with 'B' firmware (it has a silver, not blue button).
Why not go open source on this and build a better NAS?
http://www.openfiler.com/
This product will one day allow SMBs to do with the SAN/NAS companies what they have done to Micro$oft...
Why not go open source on this and build a better NAS?
http://www.openfiler.com/
This product will one day allow SMBs to do with the SAN/NAS companies what they have done to Micro$oft...
I picked one of these up today at CompUSA too. It is the B revision hardware and should play nicely with my new D-Link 802.11g setup that I'm getting ready to install. Should have it all done this coming weekend.
I'd say that's overpriced, because for $81, you can get this asus 2.5" (notebook) drive enclosure
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833320110
built in 802.11g access point, ethernet port, and USB 1.1 port with two options. in the default mode, it just copies files off any usb device (like a memory key) and puts them on the disk. In the other, it shares the usb drive.
it does samba and has a load of other features. really great for portability. you can set up profiles to have it automatically associate (in client mode) to your home or office AP, and then act as an AP when off those networks.
it runs great in the car off a very common adapter size (i use a PSP power adapter).
The only drawback is that you're limited to 2.5" drives, which are expensive. but it's highy portable and using laptop drives could stand up to more knockaround. slightly different niche, but it was a perfect solution for me
If this has open source firmware like my WRT45G it would really be neat. Imagine all the benefits of customized firmware like sveasoft and openwrt with the ability to write to local disk.
To answer my own question it uses ext3.
It would be a cold day in H*** before I would trust my data to a DLINK device. I can't tell you how many of customer issues I've traced to their hardware. I won't warrenty any systems with Dlink in them.
Also both the Netgear SC101(lots of overheat issues) and DLINK box format the drives to a propretory format so if the box crashes you are out of luck.
A much better alternative is to use a Linksys NSLU2 NAS server ($89). Plug in up to two USB drives and away you go. I haven't had a customer complaint yet. The latest firmware supports both FAT32 or NTFS on the drives. Its a true SMB so it also support Linux and Mac. Plus the OS is linux and there are availabe media servers, webservers, etc available to install in it.
Another product I've heard good stuff about is the Simpletech "Simpleshare" line of NAS drives. I might try these in the future. Only thing I don't like is the non FAT/NTFS file formats.
How come none of these NAS or external hard drive enclosures support SATA? Sure, you can find a *few* on eBay but I just find it very odd that there are no mainstream manufacturers. Is there something about the SATA spec I don't understand? I have a 250GB just sitting on my desk!
CompUSA now has it at $150, but it's all h/w version A1. USB drives really don't work at all; after each device reboot, and after one or two file copies, the drives effectively freeze.
I just picked up this device. Works flawlessly with SMB and FTP protocols. If you look on the inside, it is actually a PowerPC chip made my motorola, probably running Linux, as it makes use of ext2, ext3 and FAT filesystems, and has read only support for NTFS. I have found something bad about the device though. It seems there is a 2GB filesize limit even when using an ext3 formatted drive. This is a real problem when wanting to store big ISOs. The full version of Nero Backup is nice, as well as the extra USB support.