Linksys NSLU2 Removable Media

  • Thread starter Thread starter ozonepark
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ozonepark

I hooked up a compact flash reader to my NSLU2. The problem is when I
remove the card the NSLU2 get upset and its little disk light flashes.
At that point it will not read any flash cards until in disconnect and
reconnect the USB cable. Has anyone experienced this?

Overall, I'm not too impressed with the NSLU2. It needs to be hand
rebooted after a power failure. I spoke to Linksys about this and
they admit it is a problem. It also take forever to boot. It is not
to speedy. But by far its biggest problem is it won't accept FAT32 or
NTFS volumes.

Anyone else using this device having similar issues?
 
ozonepark said:
I hooked up a compact flash reader to my NSLU2. The problem is when I
remove the card the NSLU2 get upset and its little disk light flashes.
At that point it will not read any flash cards until in disconnect and
reconnect the USB cable. Has anyone experienced this?
Click to expand...

It's not documented to support CF readers so why do you expect this to work?
Overall, I'm not too impressed with the NSLU2. It needs to be hand
rebooted after a power failure. I spoke to Linksys about this and
they admit it is a problem. It also take forever to boot. It is not
to speedy.
Click to expand...

It's a 73 buck substitute for a real file server and connects to the disk
through a USB bridge. One would expect it to be slow.
But by far its biggest problem is it won't accept FAT32 or
NTFS volumes.
Click to expand...

That's not a problem for its intended use. The idea is that you plug a disk
into it and leave it plugged in permanently, not that you use it as a
substitute for a USB port on a computer. It's a dirt cheap file server
that works like you would expect a dirt cheap file server to work, which is
to say not particularly well. There's a reason that Novell and Microsoft
can get a thousand bucks for their server software you know.
 
I hooked up a compact flash reader to my NSLU2. The problem is when I
remove the card the NSLU2 get upset and its little disk light flashes.
At that point it will not read any flash cards until in disconnect and
reconnect the USB cable. Has anyone experienced this?

Overall, I'm not too impressed with the NSLU2. It needs to be hand
rebooted after a power failure. I spoke to Linksys about this and
they admit it is a problem. It also take forever to boot. It is not
to speedy. But by far its biggest problem is it won't accept FAT32 or
NTFS volumes.

Anyone else using this device having similar issues?
Click to expand...

After years of building PCs to be file servers and trying to reduce
noise and heat, I'm really happy with my NSLU2. On the other hand, I
don't usually use flash memory in the Disk 2 slot. One reason is that
I now have the server tucked away in a cabinet and drives attached to
both USB ports, but even before that, the instructions said that you
had to power down the NSLU2 to insert the flash...I did that once with
a pen drive, but it seemed pretty worthless. There's also some
utility that you can install if you are using flash drives enough to
warrant it. That particular feature seems like one of those marketing
things that looks good in a short blurb in the brochure, but that the
product development guys hope no one ever uses.

As far as your boot problem, I now have a 160GB and a 120GB drive
attached to my NSLU2. There has only been one time that my house took
a power hit and the NSLU2 (which was not on an UPC at the time) went
down while my computer stayed on (my computer is a laptop so the
battery kept it running). Since my music library is on one of the
drives, I noticed it went down immediately. I didn't really pay close
attention - I was checking the drive often as I was a little worried
that my files would be screwed up, but I would guess that it took less
than 30 seconds for it to come back up...which I thought was actually
pretty fast considering it had to do a filesystem integrity check.

As you can tell, I'm a huge fan of the NSLU2. Lot's of storage, no
fan, the USB bus is plenty fast enough since I'm going over a 100Mb
network to get to it and it's running Linux with the EXT3 filesystem
so I don't worry about reliability.
 
I had to modify the NSLU2 I was trying to use as a fileserver to
always stay on by adding a resistor to the circuitry so it always
comes on when power is applied - I found one web site that gave me
some clues on how to make this modification but I had to have some
knowledgeable technician make the modification slightly differently.
This voids your warranty but in my case I needed to be sure the NSLU2
could turn on by itself after a power outage since I was planning on
using it as an unattended fileserver - I don't know why Linksys made
it the way they did since even for personal use you wouldn't want it
to not come back automatically when there is a power hit. I also had
to use the unslung firmware and format the flash drive I was using as
EXT3 (normally only a hard drive can be formatted as EXT3 by the stock
firmware) before I could get reliable large file tranfers. Hopefully
now it will work OK - I have yet to test it long term as a fileserver
to know if it really is going to be any good but the size and the fact
that with a USB flash it has no moving parts that can fail was what I
was after. I am sure eventually somebody will hack this device into
being even more useful or some other company will make a similiar
device for about the same price that doesn't have the same limitations
that require these workarounds.
 
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