Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Digital Trends Reviews the Linksys NSLU2 NAS
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 11:04 AM
"If you’re looking for a simple out of the box NAS solution, the Linksys NSLU2 is a good all around contender. Novices will appreciate the easy default setup, while pros will benefit from the extensive open source initiative surrounding “The Slug.” However, limited supported capacities and only 2 USB ports make other offerings very attractive options if you don’t want to void the warranty."
This looks like a decent, if not overly impressive, NAS. I really like the concept of NAS drives, but they never seem to live up to my expectations. I purchased a Maxtor NAS drive a little over a year ago, and it basically gets used for backups and not much else. One of the biggest problems is the speed - it's 100 megabit, and working with files on it is slow. Worse, because it's so slow, having it be the primary source of files is intolerable. While I love the idea of having all my media on a central NAS drive and having each PC access it, the reality is that editing digital media stored on a NAS is a painful experience.
At CES this year I talked to several NAS companies and asked why gigabit connections weren't more commonplace - their response was that gigabit didn't improve speed by any significant margin, the bottlenecks were related to file systems, etc. If that's the case, then NAS drives are going to be slow for a long time to come. Do you have a NAS drive? How do you use it?
This looks like a decent, if not overly impressive, NAS. I really like the concept of NAS drives, but they never seem to live up to my expectations. I purchased a Maxtor NAS drive a little over a year ago, and it basically gets used for backups and not much else. One of the biggest problems is the speed - it's 100 megabit, and working with files on it is slow. Worse, because it's so slow, having it be the primary source of files is intolerable. While I love the idea of having all my media on a central NAS drive and having each PC access it, the reality is that editing digital media stored on a NAS is a painful experience.
At CES this year I talked to several NAS companies and asked why gigabit connections weren't more commonplace - their response was that gigabit didn't improve speed by any significant margin, the bottlenecks were related to file systems, etc. If that's the case, then NAS drives are going to be slow for a long time to come. Do you have a NAS drive? How do you use it?
