I can speak as someone who actually owned one of these. I was looking for a cheap NAS solution for my home network. I even took in the article on tomshardware first (big mistake to believe anything on that site, pure marketing, IMHO). The unit I received refused to see any of the USB hard drives I attached to it without going through a reformat on my PC first, then following a crazy power up scheme to get it to recognize the drive. My first task was going to be to take a ghost image of my main PC, I attempted this, only to have to unit go completely unresponsive during the transfer. I had to hard reset the unit in order to regain access to the interface, only to find the hard drive would not mount again! To make matters worse, I went through this process three times before I finally submitted to calling Linksys support (read, India). I actually got put on hold as soon as I mentioned the units model, and was transferred to a higher tech. He actually admitted terrible stability issues with this unit and suggested I try a new firmware upgrade. I did this, was able to remount the hard drive, only to have it fail when trying to just copy over some MP3 files. Another support call to Linksys gave me another firmware upgrade, which proceeded to destroy the unit completely! At this point the NSLU2 went back for a refund. Tech support from Linksys admits this unit is bad, the proprietary format it uses renders whatever drive you attach to it unreadable from anything other than the NSLU2 itself. Bad, unstable product which I suggest you avoid. An $80 NAS solution is obviously too good to be true. How about some real world tests instead of just hacking some stripped down buggy Linux box.
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Because RTFA made me piss my pants, that's why. So have some of these comments. Besides, gits are funny.
Understood, but I didn't purchase this thing to hack it, I bought it to use it for a cheap NAS solution.
I can speak as someone who actually owned one of these. I was looking for a cheap NAS solution for my home network. I even took in the article on tomshardware first (big mistake to believe anything on that site, pure marketing, IMHO). The unit I received refused to see any of the USB hard drives I attached to it without going through a reformat on my PC first, then following a crazy power up scheme to get it to recognize the drive. My first task was going to be to take a ghost image of my main PC, I attempted this, only to have to unit go completely unresponsive during the transfer. I had to hard reset the unit in order to regain access to the interface, only to find the hard drive would not mount again! To make matters worse, I went through this process three times before I finally submitted to calling Linksys support (read, India). I actually got put on hold as soon as I mentioned the units model, and was transferred to a higher tech. He actually admitted terrible stability issues with this unit and suggested I try a new firmware upgrade. I did this, was able to remount the hard drive, only to have it fail when trying to just copy over some MP3 files. Another support call to Linksys gave me another firmware upgrade, which proceeded to destroy the unit completely! At this point the NSLU2 went back for a refund. Tech support from Linksys admits this unit is bad, the proprietary format it uses renders whatever drive you attach to it unreadable from anything other than the NSLU2 itself. Bad, unstable product which I suggest you avoid. An $80 NAS solution is obviously too good to be true. How about some real world tests instead of just hacking some stripped down buggy Linux box.