[ubuntu-uk] USB NAS adapter samba connection

[David King]

A NAS is a Network Attached Storage, i.e. it is attached to your 
Network, not to your PC. If your PC is attached to the same network, 
then you can access it via samba from your Ubuntu PC.

I also had a NAS, which I originally set up under Windows XP, I thnk it 
had to be configured via a web interface, which was on a computer 
running XP (or was it a special piece of software I installed, I cannot 
recall now), back in the days before I ever even had heard of Ubuntu. It 
was a Linksys NSLU2.

It has 2 USB ports, which both had hard drives attached to them via IDE 
to USB adapters. Both were formatted, by the NAS, using ext2 or ext3.

But in more recent times, one of the hard drives died and I can no 
longer get the data off it, having tried everything I could think of.

But so long as you can attach hard drives to the NAS, then it is a 
useful device for having extra storage space on your network, if you do 
not want to attach the drives to your PC or have more than 1 PC 
accessing the same files.

Although file transfers via the ethernet are slow compared to having the 
drive directly plugged into the PC.

And I think that most NAS drives run a modified Linux OS inside them, so 
if you can hack into it you can add more functionality. I have heard of 
people using them for print servers.

They seem to be very cheap now, so go for one that has enough USB ports 
and can be configured via a web interface.

David King



Tommy Pyatt wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I've been trying to use my old Eee PC 701 as a server on my home 
> network for data on a 1TB external USB hard drive, however for some 
> reason files are being transferred painfully slow to my desktop via 
> samba. I am considering giving NFS a go to see if I can achieve faster 
> transfers, but I also remembered seeing a NAS adapter for USB storage 
> a while back.
>
> Here's an example of which, from MicroDirect 
> http://www.microdirect.co.uk/home/product/38589/Single-Port-USB-NAS-Adapter
>
> The spec mentions that this product (as do many other NAS-USB 
> adapters) 'only supports XP or Vista'. Does anyone have any experience 
> on using these sort of things on Ubuntu? Specifically I wanted to know 
> whether I will be able to use samba to access the share that it 
> creates and how the speed will compare to using NFS on my old netbook.
>
> I am using Karmic on my desktop and Karmic NBR on the netbook. Any 
> response would be greatly appreciated, thanks,
>
> Tommy