A NAS (Network Attached Storage) for the Media Center

Today arrived my new NAS!
I bought it on EBay, bidding from a German Ebayer that was really honest, precise and quick in the transaction.

I've choosen this particular one because it has 2 bays so it can hold up to 2 hard disks either Parallel ATA (PATA/IDE) or Serial ATA (SATA) and it has a 1 Gigabit Ethernet interface (instead of the common FastEthernet 10/100 Mbps). In addition there's an USB 1.1 port that can be used to attach to a printer in order to have the NAS acting also as a network printer server.

My first and quick test was with two old IDE hard disks of 6,5 and 40 GBytes. I just plugged them in and boot up the NAS to see what would happen.

To be really honest I was not happy of the product at the first test. I have a major problem regarding the network connectivity. The logical link is continuously flapping and I am able to operate on its HTTP interface only from time to time. From the network disk access point of view I have to wait when the NAS is reachable (when the logical link is up) and then access files, during copies or file moves the logical link is stable. So I had to launch big copies in order to work on the interface and look into menus and functions.

I think that this problem is coming from the fact that the switch that I'm using is a 10/100 Mbps and the NAS network driver is not enough able to handle the speed autosensing. Unfortunately there's no way to configure a fixed interface speed on it so I can't correct this problem for now.

So, basically it may be a good product but actually it has a crappy firmware and it is already the latest version!
So I immediately made some searches regarding it's chipset to find more informations and, hopefully solutions for the firmware.

I found that it the unit is a 35-HD-DUAL-NAS-E manufactured by MRT Communication. It is based on a well known StorLink chipset, the SL3516E from the Gemini family based on ARM processor. This means that probably there is a porting of some linux flavour to this platform.

Infact, some web searches after I discovered that there's an entire NAS-Central section regarding this unit. It is the MRT section where there's already available a porting of TinkyLS firmware and, wow, a very old friend: OpenWRT!

Great!
I think that next step will be to replace the original firmware with a more familiar one, and, hopefully compile by myself my favourite flavour of OpenWRT patckages! Unfortunately the actual firmware may be replaced just by using an interface to connect on the internal serial interface. So, the real next step will be to build up this serial interface!

Stay tuned!