Over the weekend I have been setting up and configuring my new network attached storage. I now have 160GB of fresh space to store all my music files and downloads. A much needed upgrade from the 30GB hard drive that was being used (28 GB were already in use). I can now continue my project of re-encoding all of my CDs to a higher bit rate.
I have achieved this wonderful state of storage bliss by using the Linksys NSLU2 unit and an Iomega 160GB USB drive. The Linksys NSLU2 is a really tiny device, but it’s full of nice features. You can attach up to 2 USB 2.0 hard drives to it and then create shares on those drives. Since the NSLU2 is assigned it’s own IP Address on your network it lets you access the shares directly across the network. You can even create users, assign them to groups, and then manage group access to shares.
To top it off the NSLU2 even does backup, either from a device on your network to the NSLU2, or from the NSLU2 to a device on your network. Or, if you have 2 drives attached to it you can backup from one drive to the other.
This setup is perfect for small to medium offices; the hell with spending a fortune on other NAS devices.
To me the coolest thing about the NSLU2 was the fact that it runs Linux as its operating system and uses Samba to allow access from most other operating systems (seems to work on Windows, Mac OSX, and other Linux distros).
This has to be one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Well, back to encoding all 1000+ CDs in my collection!