I got this for Christmas which was about 6 months ago. It’s probably a good device for the non-technical consumer but it has a few drawbacks for the advanced user that wants more. Some of the advantages for the SimpleShare are that it supports mirroring/striping via multiple external USB hard drives, has a built-in print server, and supports multiple disk pools with “AES encryption” so saith the docs. I haven’t tried using the RAID or encryption features. The print server works quite well, though. File sharing is enabled through CIFS and NFS. However, the box also has a few bugs and annoyances. First among these is the absence of the lockd daemon while using NFS. It’s completely retarded that lockd was not included since it would make it usable for a small group of users. Without lockd, multiple people can edit the same file simultaneously and overwrite the other person’s changes. Second, is the fact that power management is nonfunctional, period! The case of the NAS does get quite warm some times but that wouldn’t matter so much if the hard drive shutdown occassionally.

Read/write Benchmarks

$ time cp ./ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso /home/ebrake/
real 1m29.990s
user 0m0.108s
sys 0m7.904s

This is the result of reading a 698MB iso over a 10/100 ethernet network. 698 megabytes/1 minutes 29 seconds = 62.741573Mb/s

$ time mv /home/ebrake/ubuntu-7.04-desktop-i386.iso /mnt/nfsbackup/test_diskimg.iso
real 3m10.700s
user 0m0.044s
sys 0m2.700s

This is the result of writing a 698MB iso over a 10/100 ethernet network. 698 Megabytes/3 minutes 10 seconds = 29.3894737 Both of these of the transfers were over NFS. Given that write speeds are half as fast as reads it probably is doing synchronous transfers (at least I hope so!).