Finally got my hands on a couple of the Argosy units recently, and I
think I'm beginning to see where some of the limitations come into
play.

SNAS05-0607 (Tritton) is the most recent firmware I've tried so far.

Simple file copying hasn't been bad, as long as there aren't multiple
sessions (simultaneous operations) going - even between the NAS box
and a single client PC. Things can crawl with two or more going
though.

Where performance really falls down seems to be random operations and
rapid short file creation/deletion. I haven't tried PST files yet,
but Jet ("Access") databases can really crawl, especially on query
operations against even a small database.

I haven't experienced data corruption, just some really sad
performance. Some of this can be moderated by keeping database
connections open throughout a session instead of using the generally
more scalable and reliable open-act-close technique. Some
significant performance (responsiveness) penalty is expected with the
latter technique of course... but this is ridiculous.

I attribute most of this to the tiny (or no) disk cache in the NAS box
along with an SMB implementation no better (or worse?) than SAMBA
offers. Basically these devices have to be viewed as "tape drives."

I'd thought people viewing these things as backup devices to be a bit
unsophisticated. The truth seems to be that this may be the only
real target application for these machines.

For comparison I took an old computer here that has a Celeron 400 and
128MB of RAM, and installed and patched up (as much as I can at this
point, support being what it is) Windows 95 OSR 2.1 as a dumb file
server of the type these units represent - share level passwords. I
stripped out (avoided installing) any protocols but TCP/IP and
Windows file/print sharing, and did a few disk cache tweaks but
nothing out of the ordinary.

To really be fair I probably ought to be using a 486 with 16 MB or
something... but realistically that's a doorstop today. Almost
nobody would bother running one, and a machine of the specs I'm
testing is a nearly free item today as a used computer goes.

Needless to say, the Win95 box runs rings around the Argosy/Tritton
box. None of the headaches with Jet either. Response is smooth and
fast, even with NetMeeting RDS running (as a remote-admin tool). It
would be trivial to connect a parallel printer and/or a couple of USB
printers, put in 3 hard drives and an optical drive, etc.

This is an old slimline Dell Optiplex, and runs cool and quiet -
though it is obviously more bulky than these tiny NAS devices.
Windows 95 or 98 are a bit pricier than a Linux/SMB combo for the
same hardware - but with none of the headaches or quirks.


I really wanted these things to work. I had high hopes. Right now I
am having my doubts though. I'll give that beta firmware a shot but
I suspect the real limitation is the hardware (RAM) available and the
resulting lack of disk cache.