This year I got myself a new kick ass workstation (dual XEON duos, 4Gig ram, 2 256Mb Video cards, 3 20” LCDs – ie it kicks ass). My old workstation was good and I had planned to use it as a server (you can never have too many servers) but it has sat turned off sense March. Yesterday I decided it was time to bring it back to life as a host for a few virtual machines I’m using.
Unfortunately I forgot that I had yanked its 250Gb D: drive to use in the new workstation. So it was time to go get a new drive. I ran to BestBuy figuring that I’d grab a cheap 200Gb drive and be done with it. I wasn’t prepared for what I found: 1Tb hard drives! Even better, or so I thought, they had 1Tb external drives that had Ethernet ports on the back! Cool! Plug it in, turn it on, map the drive and party! So like a rube at the carnival I bought it.
My first impression was great. The unit was small, the size a hard back sci-fi novel, and very nice looking. I plugged it in and powered it up and then grabbed the docs. WFT!? I have to install a driver? Alright. Turns out they give you this MioNet crap that handles setting and managing the share. The drive doesn’t just act like a network share that you map and then start copying files to. MioNet does a bunch of extra crap that I really didn’t want going on and didn’t provided a way to say essentially – just give me the friggin file share.
I decided to ignore that and press on. I started to copy stuff out. My home network uses 100Mb Ethernet. Guess what? A 25Gb VPC image takes nearly an hour and a half to copy to the drive. Are you kidding me? There would be no way I could use this to host VPC images. Even if I switch to Gigabit Ethernet its too slow.
End result – I threw the boat anchor back in the box and went back to BestBuy. I picked up a 1Tb SATA300 drive and controller for a little more. It is taking about 20 minutes to copy over 45Gigabytes of VPC to the machine (two drive images for one machine).
I still like the idea of having a NAS in my house. But if you’re going to sell me on it make sure it just works. I’m fine with a driver, but goofy crap that does more than what I want needs to be able to be turned off or installed as a separate application.
As for the speed – that was sorta my fault. I knew in the back of my head there was no way a 100Mb Ethernet was going to support this.
While I’m not a fan of MyBook for my purposes for other people it might be a really good product. People who like to hack stuff should love this thing, and basic users should also like it.
Hackers should like it b/c the box is running Linux and you can get SSH going along with a bunch of other stuff. In fact the way the box is making the drive available to you is via CIFS. However, in my case I just wanted to plug it in and run. I really don’t have time to be hacking a box so it will do what I want it to do. That said I really think WD would be wise to cater to this market. There are tons of geeks out there that will buy products they can hack and customize.
For basic users the MioNet stuff might pass muster. If all you want to do is create a pile of music, your photo album and other stuff – this thing will do it. But if you are looking to host really big files I don’t think it is the answer.