Product Description

Now you can quickly and easily add gigabytes of storage space onto your network with the Network Storage Link from Linksys. This tiny network appliance connects USB 2.0 hard drives directly to your Ethernet network. You can connect up to two stand-alone USB disk drives of any size, and access them from anywhere on your network. You can even plug a USB flash disk into the Network Storage Link, for a convenient way of accessing your portable data files. The Network Storage Link can also be set up so that your...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4610 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Linksys
• Model: NSLU2-UK
• Released on: 2004-08-31
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .34 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Now you can quickly and easily add gigabytes of storage space onto your network with the Network Storage Link from Linksys;This tiny network appliance connects USB 2.0 hard drives directly to your Ethernet network;You can connect up to two stand-alone USB disk drives of any size, and access them from anywhere on your network;You can even plug a USB flash disk into the Network Storage Link, for a convenient way of accessing your portable data files;The Network Storage Link can also be set up so that your storage devices are accessible from the Internet -- files can be easily downloaded via your web browser;Your files can be available publicly, or create password-protected accounts for authorised users;Installation of the Network Storage Link is simple -- just plug it directly into your 10/100 Ethernet network, and attach your USB 2.0 hard drives or flash disk;It can self-configure to your network via DHCP or you can use the built-in utility to manually configure it;With the speedy USB 2.0 interface, you'll get quick response times with even your largest files;

The Network Storage Link features built-in disk utilities, accessible through your web browser;You can format new disk drives, and scan drives for errors;The built-in backup program lets you schedule full, incremental, or synchronisation backups of your network drives to the Network Storage Link, or vice versa;It will even send you an email message when a hard drive gets nearly full, completely full, or has an error;The Network Storage Link is a fast, simple, flexible and economical way to add storage to your network

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

Quality control?
I bought one of these intending to install a custom firmware that would allow me to use it as a music server on the LAN and over the web. I got it up and running on my network with the standard firmware in no time, but when I switched it off in order to attach a disk drive, it failed to restart - all I got was the power light, none of the system LEDs would come on, and the thing didn't boot. Tried resetting, nothing worked.

I suspect it was a heat-related failure, even though it'd only run for about a half hour - I noticed when switching it off that the plastic casing was hot to the touch. There's little ventilation on the unit body.

My advice - avoid.

Great idea but just too slow
Title says it all really - like every other NAS solution I've tried, it's just too slow to be practical.

Worth the effort
Bought one of these second-hand but in mint-condition initially as a low-power, quiet RAID 1 network file/media server to hide in the loft.

Re-flashed it with Unslung but wanted more! So I went with Debian and now I have RAID 1 on two external 500GB USB drives, rTorrent thru simple folder access, MediaTomb for my PS3 and other media players, spin-down on the HDDs and the OS running on an old-ish 1GB USB stick that is hard-wired inside the unit. Other HW mods include doubling the CPU speed and auto-power up should the power fail.

To be honest, I've got this far with a lot of effort and pain (took 12 full re-installs of Debian before the RAID was successfully set up) and a lot of reading up and experimentation especially if you're a relatively newbie to Linux (like me) for tweaking scripts, recommended workarounds, using cunning partitioning and disabling logs to maximise HDD spin-down etc.

My conclusion - my setup uses around 26 watts - with spin-down it's probably less compared to the ~200W that my PC was taking when serving media files. Worth it if you can invest some time and effort to maximise the functionality and you want to be green.