The other day, a friend of mine was asking about the Buffalo TeraStation 1.0 TB. Now, that’s not interesting in itself, because he’s had a SnapServer for years (I didn’t provide a link to his particular appliance because I don’t think they market it anymore). What’s interesting is that they’re becoming more common, even at $600, $700, $800, heck another friend of mine bought one a few months ago for $900. Not a bad price for 1TB of storage, but still a chunk of money to lay out.
That got me to thinking about a device another friend told me about a while back, the Linksys NSLU2 NAS adapter. It’s a standalone unit into which you plug USB disks. And the interesting thing about that is that it runs Linux … and there are firmwares available to turn it into an email server, an OpenVPN server, a print server, even a webcam server. Run on over to the NSLU2-Linux site, which is the source for all of this.
And, last but not least, it reminded me that the last firmware I’d downloaded for my own Tritton Technologies SimpleNAS ignored the seconds field of a file’s timestamp, making it pretty useless as a backup target for something like Microsoft’s SyncToy. So, I headed on over to Tritton’s downloads page and saw that they’ve released a new version (well, back in October). I intend to load that up as soon as I get done here and bring my own, simple little NAS back into service.