Looking for the right box

[threeheadedpuppy]

Hiya,

I've been looking for a new toy for awhile, namely portable storage. My ideal setup would be combining a NSLU2 with an USB2 caddy (which supported eSATA as well). I'd want to format my drive with FAT32 so that I could connect my HD straight to my client system if I wanted to, for fast read/write, but also be able to stream things straight to XMBC via LAN. My question is - is there a product out there has wrapped these features into a single box?

 

[thiggins]

Do you want to support a USB, SATA or IDE drive?

 

[threeheadedpuppy]

Ideally the NAS box would communicate with the harddrive with SATA, and it would also have a host eSATA port (or at least a host USB) so that you could use it as as external harddrive when you needed to. (I've seen a few NAS/external harddrives, but none seem to have any of the fancy linux-type services that the NSLU has...)
Thanks
-russ

 

[thiggins]

NAS eSATA ports are for expanding NAS storage, not for attaching the NAS to a host system.
The NSLU2 is very old and not very fast. There are, however, many hacks for it.

 

[threeheadedpuppy]

It would be neat though So are there any fancy nas boxes that can be used as external hd using regular usb2 connection that you know of?
Thanks for the replies - i appreciate it, as I've been drilling my head into the floor trying to find the right thing!

 

[thiggins]

Some of the LaCie's do, like the Ethernet mini v2. But I found them to be kind of quirky due to the way they do the USB connection.

 

[threeheadedpuppy]

Yeah thats kinda what I'm looking for I guess - the usb does sound a bit flakey though - a usb mass storage device is a lot easier to use, a sounds a lot faster than "TCP over USB"...
Proper direct access to the nas harddrive would be nice, short of actually taking it out of the device and plugging it into my pc.