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Plug Touts Expandable Storage Via USB Drives Plugged In At Home
DeviceGuru writes with an excerpt that may be of interest especially for mobile users with cheap, always available wireless data: "An OpenWRT Linux-based hardware adapter called Plug designed for unifying USB-connected storage met its $69,000 Kickstarter pledge goal in 12 hours. The tiny Plug device eschews cloud storage for a localized approach whereby an app or driver installed on each participating computer or mobile device intercepts filesystem accesses, and redirects data reads and writes to storage drives attached to the user's Plug device. The Plug enjoyed one of the fastest fulfillments in Kickstarter history, meeting its goal in 12 hours, and has already soared to over $223,000 in funding."
http://www.amazon.com/Addonics-NASU2-NAS-Adapter/dp/B001OC5J9U/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1373815402&sr=8-3&keywords=usb+nas
Because you don't want to configure iSCSI to a cheap, small device with GigE which runs Linux (like a PogoPlug) yourself, or because the OS you hope to use as a client doesn't come with iSCSI drivers.
I've never actually tried it myself, so I won't use words like "lazy" since it might be a lot harder than I imagine.
Supposedly (according to Wikipedia) there has been an iSCSI initiator in Windows since Win2k. It's certainly in Linux these days, and in Linux since 2.6.12 or 3.1 depending on how you're counting, I don't know which came first but would guess 3.1.
A second-generation pogoplug (not first-and-a-half, which is what the rev.2 really is) has GigE and USB3 and can run Debian. If I were looking for a cut-rate way to attach a remote storage device to my PC as if it were local, that's what I'd use.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The biggest flaw in this device is that it's expected that you can plug in a plug at work for offsite backup. Do these people actually work at corporate america? It's a non-company sanctioned device connected to the corporate network consuming a non-trivial amount of bandwidth. The odds of this flying at the work place are nearly 0, and most likely the network admin would look at you like you're crazy for even suggesting it.
"The device includes a USB 2.0 port and a 10/100 Ethernet port with an average transfer speed of 30Mbps"
In what alternate reality is 30 megabit-per-second an acceptable speed for accessing terabytes of data? That's not even 4 MB/s of average transfer speed. That's not even fast enough to play a 1080p content, and a goodly amount of 720p content.
You want me to even consider a device like this? It needs to have USB 3.0 support, a gigabit link and be able to reliably push at least 500mbit in both directions (device dependant). If that raises the price, then the price needs to be raised - because under 4 MB/s is simply not an acceptable transfer speed. For crying out loud, hard drives have been faster than that for over 20 years.
/dev/random
Unless the "plug" has a lot more RAM than your average plug-in device, Plug can't support ZFS either. ZFSoL has a minimum RAM recommendation of 2GB. ZFS also has the overhead of checksumming, which on modern non-embedded CPUs isn't a problem, but on an embedded system, present a significant overhead.
ZFS is an enterprise filesystem; it's not designed for low-end hardware.
Please help metamoderate.
It's VPN, a NAS file server and desktop software integration.
I'm especially curious about their APIs and whether it'll be hackable.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I've been a fan of http://www.backupthat.com/ for a while now and they do something similar. You get unlimited (ever expanding) storage through your email. Essentially, when you run out of space, you just connect another email account. I've got about 500GB stored with them for free.