ARGOSY - HD363N - Network Storage

Noise

Note that the way to create a siren is essentially to have a fan blow
through slots. Each time a fan blade sweeps past a slot, it emits a
pusle of air. Do that fast enough, and the pulses add up to a whine.

Once I get a chance, I'm going to pop the fan out and cut out the
funky fan grill slots in my generic HD363N. This will leave a hole
about the size of a quarter where the fan is, instead of a bunch of
little slots, but it should mostly eliminate the whiney part of the
fan noise. It will
also invalidate your warranty. Where I put my NAS, there should not
be a problem with people sticking their fingers in the fan, so a fan
guard is not really needeed.

I have two NASes. I put an old (4 years) 20 GB drive in the first one.
It makes a noise like a coffee grinder whenever the drive is spinning.
Can't hear the fan whine at all. I put a new Segate in the other one.
Can't hear the drive at all, just the fan whine. So the dirve
loudness is a major factor with this unit, and it is probably
worthwhile to get a newer drive with fluid bearings if the drive
noise is a problem.

What's the deal with the forum posting multiple times?

I hit reply, logged in, composed my message, and hit submit.
I saw a typo once I saw it in the forum, so I clicked edit, fixed it,
previewed it, and submitted. I've done this a bunch of times before
without multiple posts. This time, the EDITED version is posted
twice, once as segbert, regular user, and once as segbert, guest. The
original version does not show up, where I spelled will as wil in "it
will also invalidate your warranty". It did take an enormous amount
of time to submit the edit, but I specifically did NOT click on the
submit button more than once, because I did not want to create a
double post.

Anyway, sorry for the double post.

edswrote:
[quote:b5288ba03d]fixuserwrote:
Well, I've given up on the Argosy/Tritton device.

Even with the latest 06-1013 firmware release, I've not been able
to
get a reliable file server. I've waited patiently for 6 months,
but
cannot wait any longer to get a good file server up and running.
Thus, I've returned to investigating other devices available, and
have now setteled into using the Linksys NSLU2.

The NSLU2 has matured over time, and now supports EXT3, FAT32 and
NTFS disk formats. The security features of the device (password
protected storage, user allocated space, for example) cannot be used
with FAT32 and NTFS formats; all the data is public on these types of
disks. But, this is the first NAS device I've seen that can both
read
and write FAT32 and NTFS.

I will caution that performance with NTFS disks is not as good as
FAT32 and EXT3.

I've seen many postings on the internet complaining about disks
formatted to EXT3 being useless to PC users. Well, I've found two
EXT2/EXT3 drivers for Windows that work very well. I've had no
issues reading and writing to EXT3 disk on my PC. So, I have no
concerns all the features of the NSLU2 with EXT3 formatted disks. If
I need to work with those disks, I can easily.

Everything I tried to do with the Argosy/Tritton devices I have
been
able to do with the NSLU2 ... including keeping my Outlook *.pst
files
on the network. I've been running with my *.pst file on the NSLU2
for
more than a week now without a single issue.

The NSLU2 is slightly slower in write speed, and comparable in read
speed. Given how the NSLU2 has been able to do everything I
wanted,
this slight speed loss it trivial in my eyes.

dilettante you may be interested to
know that others (at www.nslu2-linux.org) have been able to load a
slimserver onto the NSLU2 ... FYI.

As for the XBox users out there, I believe the NSLU2 properly
supports SMB and works with the XBox. If not, I have seen someone
at
the nslu2-linux group post about adding a package to the NSLU2 to
work
specifically with the Xbox
Link

I image I'll still check back in now and again ... don't know why,
but maybe after trying my best and contributing what time I could,
I'm curious if they ever live up to their potential.

Good Luck everyone!

you've been a great asset to this forum and your hard work has helped
me a lot. Sad to see you go.

BTW - how much was that Linksys NAS? Where did you buy
it?[/quote:b5288ba03d]

this forum is screwed up. that last post was not mine.

Check out this link about notepad issues, especially number 4:

http://blog.natbat.co.uk/archive/200...22/NotepadBugs

Sounds kind of like the bug y'all are experiencing, and I am pretty
sure he didn't have an HD363N. BTW, notepad has lots of bugs

My personal experience with this device has been good, but I have had
to learn to use it within its performance parameters. It is a nice
device at a cheap price, but it will never be able to serve up all of
your files to use in your various apps like excel, word, quickbooks,
etc daily. I think many of you are expecting far too much out of a
sub-$100 device. This thing is nothing more than some some storage
available online. Some of you here seem to want a file server and I
wholly encourage you to set up an old win95 or linux box to do that for
you. You will get much greater performance. Try an ebay search for a
"dell gx110 SFF" put a bigger hard drive in it, install FreeNAS or
NASLite or Openfiler on it and voila, great file server with oodles
more power than this device for about the same price.


That said, here are a few things I have figured about using this
device:

1. Don't put a bunch of small files on there. Because of the large
cluster size, I was using more than twice the necessary space to save
all of the samll emailed images from my d-link door cam. I solved this
issue by using procmail to decode the mime attached jpgs and add them
to a gzip archive with the date as filename and then move the archive
to the nethdd nightly.

2. Don't perform functions on more than about 400 files at a time on
the device. The low memory of the device causes performance to really
slow when copying, pasting, deleting more than a few hundred files at
once. Although inconvenient it is much faster to do these type
operations in batches.

3. Avoid situations requiring you to list the entire contents of large
folders on the device. This is due to the small amount of memory as
well. Most everything I put on there is serially named or named with a
datetime which would be known, so I can fetch just that file whenever
necessary.

4. Avoid using files or folders with very long or specially charactered
names or multiple extensions. I tend to think this is a good practice
on any computer, but on such a limited device it is necessary.

5. Avoid creating elaborate folder structures. Maybe this is memorey
related too, but if you have a buttload of folders with a buttload of
subfolders, you will have problems viewing them all. They are all there
if you access them directly, but if you try and browse to them, you
might not see them. I use 6 top level folders only with only files
under that.

Again, I have to say, this device has been great and stable for me for
nearly a year now. I have not lost any data. I updated firmware once
when changing to a larger drive in it.

Just my 2 cents.

Oh yeah, one more thing, performing some operations seems to be much
faster over ftp than if you are browsing using nautilus or Explorer

Does anyone know how to fix a bad flash? I flashed my NAS and now
when it powers up, it almost immediatly powers down.

Thanks,
Ben

brady4747wrote:
Check out this link about notepad issues, especially number 4:

http://blog.natbat.co.uk/archive/200...22/NotepadBugs

Sounds kind of like the bug y'all are experiencing, and I am pretty
sure he didn't have an HD363N. BTW, notepad has lots of bugs

I'm not seeing any of these "bugs." I can reproduce the
NotePad-demonstrated problem with HD363Ns using my own programs. It
is a bug in the NAS firmware, of that I have very little doubt now.

vgear released a new firmware a few days ago. (V 024)
http://vgear.com/cs/support/download...2DGear+LANDISK


New Featu
1. Data is displayed by multi-language under Windows XP.
2. The Hostname and Group name is restricted to 15 bytes.


Fixed Issues:
1. Firmware sometimes will destroy the Hostname and Group name to
default value.
2. ARP bug.
3. DHCP Server auto start when disable and link down then up.
4. MAC OS X Tiger 10.4.3 or above can't login issue.
5. NT4 SP6 samba issue.

best regards
Quest

As per Argosy's warranty: Argosy does not warrant that the operation
of Argosy products will be uninterrupted or error free. If Argosy is
unable, within a reasonable time, to repair or replace any product to
a condition as warranted, you will be entitled to a refund of the
purchase price upon prompt return of the product.

Given that I feel waiting 6 months for a properly working unit was a
reasonable amount of time, I pursed getting a refund for my HD363N.
Well, I've been talking with Argosy since late November, and as of
today they have been true to the statement in their warranty ... I
have received a full refund for the unit.

Argosy themselves did not provide the refund, instead they worked with
the store from where purchased it so they would provide the refund.

Either way, I was pleased that they honored the warranty as stated.