Vadim Chobanu

Let’s be honest – who has the confidence in windows to take care of their precious memories? Especially when one frequently experiments with the OS, or upgrade. An interesting event happened to me a good few years ago that changed the way I look at data, when I obtained a copy of Windows Longhorn alpha (now developed into Vista) and I couldn’t wait to play with. At the time, I was still a student (hadn’t started Vadim Computers yet) and I had no other HD than my main 60Gb system drive which I partitioned as a 20Gb for my Primary OS, 15Gb for my experiments and 25Gb for data. Interestingly enough, it was shortly after my wedding and the only copy of my wedding pictures were on that same HD, the storage 25Gb partition. Nonetheless, I rebooted, inserted the longhorn alpha CD in, got the to the partition select screen, selected the empty 15Gbpartition, got windows to install, rebooted – all seemed fine, got to admire the new OS and started playing with. A few hours later, I realise the partition is a bit larger than 15Gb and looked on my storage drive to find NO PICTURES! Imagine the panic I was in. The newly created family was in jeopardy – no way would my wife have forgiven the loss of all the wedding pictures…restart to Windows XP – no pictures there either! In fury, I formatted the longhorn partition and then I said – calm down, deep breath, remember the grandfather said – there is always a solution out of any problem. So time for data recovery it was, a long day and night with no sleep until I recovered them all one by one. So since then obviously there is no more playing with the drive where I keep the data

However, storing the data on a USB HD I found it rather inconvenient as I do require remote access to my data and I can explain why. Just one example, please don’t laugh though, I know – I have my issues, but hey – who doesn’t! I am an workaholic, so even when I go on holidays, I like to keep busy in the mornings when I can’t sleep, so having access to all my files is essential if I want to have some work done.

Therefore, a fileserver was more suited for my needs, however I am not particularly a big fan of having one to burn some few hundred watts per hour just for some pictures, music and the growing number of documents, so I have watched closely the NAS market and its developments over the past few years. The idea of using a low power CPU and memory to have a file server in my opinion is great.

My first experience with a NAS box was a WD MyBook World II – dual HD RAID NAS with gigabit connection. I purchased it for the company about 1.5 years ago as it was needed as a network backup location. Nice little device, that could do RAID0, RAID1 and JBOD, but a little bit too slow. The CPU was quite weak – an Oxford Semiconductor running at 200Mhz. Nevertheless, I did the SSH hack and gave it a try in the Linux environment. I installed transmission on it (a Bittorrent and download manager application for Linux) and I did face all sorts of problems while doing so, combined with the slow speed I gave up and left it for use just as a Network share.

However about 6 months ago I decided to get a NAS box for my personal use and having seen so much noise around the Thecus brand, i decided to get their entry level n299 NAS, without even doing my research. I am not going to go into details about this one, but it made me remember the words of a good old friend – ‘I am not that rich to buy cheap stuff’, so it ended up on eBay and I was back to basics – what to buy. This time i took my time and read everything available about current NAS boxes, before I finally decided to give Netgear a go. I know, the Netgear’s old SC101 was rubbish, however the new ReadyNas Duo looked very promising.

Below I took a few pictures of what it looks like and what’s inside when you take the panels off. 

ReadyNas Duo

ReadyNas Duo - Oppened Door

ReadyNas Duo - Taking a drive out

The left pannel off - Easy to upgrade the memory

The right pannel off - Easy to replace the fan

The construction is out metal and the front bezel it is out of solid-feel heavy plastic, so I am much happier than my old Thecus n299 that felt more like… sorry won’t start on that. I know the n299 was a cheap and you get what you pay for, however i believe if a brand gets so much attention, they shouldn’t produce substandard products.

Let me draw your attention however on the 4th picture above – the memory – is just 2 screws away and it is a standard DDR SO-DIMM Laptop memory. Netgear ships the boxes with just 256Mb and I would recommend an upgrade to 1Gb to everyone who has or wants to get one of these devices. The current price for a 1Gb module is about £35 and it does speed things up, especially with downloads and torrents. So as you can see above, there is nothing wrong with the construction or design – even the fan is installed with the convenience of replacing in mind. Oh, about the fan – if you use a hot HD, it may run a bit noisy as it reads the HD temperature sensors and wont allow them to overheat. I found the built in Seagate to be cooler than the WD one by 5-6 degrees.

My main reason for buying this device was what you can actually do with it. Basically, by default the software comes ‘locked’, so if you like to play in a Linux environment, you have to ‘unlock’ or hack it in other words. It voids the warranty according to Netgear, however doing so it’s worth every penny

I won’t go into any details with how to do it as it’s all written on the readynas website:

• Install the latest firmware – both Radiator and readynas photos
• ‘unlock’ it and install apt as described here

If you know your way around Linux, then don’t read below, if you have no idea about Linux, then carry on: 

• Download putty and login to the box via SSH as root using your admin password.
• Install the required APT installation programs – webserver etc. I installed php5, GD, mysql5 only via a simple ‘apt-get install’ command. I am not a Linux guru, but it can’t be easier than that. To install php for example all was needed is the command ‘apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5’. For more commands, please visit the readynas forum or the how-to’s
• Then i used a program called WinSCP that works like a FTP client, but connects via SSH, so you have full access to all the core of the box via a nice interface with lots of commands.

WinSCP

• Now, to save time on installing and compiling your own linux programs, i found this nice sub-forum with readymade one click installations. They are basically bin files and to install a new application you just show the downloaded bin file to the firmware upgrade utility in the readynas admin software. Cant be simpler either! I installed TorrentFlux4BT V1.3, Music Browser 1.1 Secure and Xplorer V2.2 and particularly was impressed with the Music Browser - you can listen to your library from anywhere in the world and you don’t need to wait long for the music to cache as its being cached locally in flash. All these installations were pre-packaged by a readynas forum member – super-poussin. Very helpful chap – i found a bug in the music browser script and within 20 minutes he fixed it and released a new update – my hat off to him – a true enthusiast!

TorrentFlux4BT

Flash based web music player

Xplorer V2.2

• Probably I would also need to share the experience of the ReadyNas photos which is a built in program based on Dekoh engine. It’s a web gallery that stores all your pictures on your drive in your Media/Pictures folder, generates thumbnails and allows you to grant access to friends and family to view them direct online. Its still in the early stages of development and doesn’t allow much flexibility, however I prefer it more to Google as I don’t need to upload the pictures anywhere and I can share one picture or the full album. Hope they will continue the development and enhance the software as it’s very handy.

Readynas photos

• Following all the above, I created a new webshare called web via the admin interface, defined to replace the standard website and placed in the root directory a index.php file that contains just the links to all the programs i had installed for easy all in one page access.

ReadyNas Admin

custom home page

And the last but not least – this is a RAID storage device, so when you put a new drive in, it will automatically synchronise the data and the brilliance of this paricular NAS box is that is expandable – for example, you have a 500GB single drive, then add a new 1TB drive, the data will get coppied to the new drive, however when you run out of the storage, all you do is remove the 500Gb one and by adding the second 1Tb drive in, the volume will become 1Tb. The full synchronisation procedure is relativelly fast. As i took the above pictures, i removed one of the drive while the device was on and the result was that the box wanted to fully synchronise both drives, so the below screenshot shows the speed of 60Mb/s when doing so.

HD Resync

I wrote this article/blog as I found from personal experience a lot of Vadim PCs customers were losing data simply because of keeping everything on the system’s drives without regular backups, so hopefully someone will find this helpful.  Additionally, a PC made for gaming, or a laptop made to be portable are not exactly storage devices.

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