Good Bye SC101

Another Spring, another tax refund electronic check.

This time, I and finally redeem my mistake of buying this toaster oven looking Network Attached Storage wanna be:


SC101 - NETGEAR.com

I have got a Linksys NSLU2 from Amazon and Western Digital My Book Premium 500GB an USB 2.0 External HardDrive from Costco.

First step was to retrieve all the valuable photos from SC101, overall there are 150 GB of photos and video chronicled our lives. It took 24 hours, no less, to copy all of them to my USB HDD.

In contrast it took less than 2 hours to copy from the USB HDD to my new PC.

So let's do the math:

The Router is rated at 10/100 Mps so is SC101, the laptop which I used as a tandem is also at 10/100 Mps. USB 2.0 is rated at 480 Mps. So the bottle neck is accessing those files from SC101.
And it is at: 150G/24 hours approx = 1.7361 Mps

In conclusion, just the transfer speed itself is a waste of my money.

Whereas transferring 150 GB via USB is at 150G/2 hours approx = 20 Mps

All things consider at a 20X speed it is the end of story.

Final thoughts of SC101: It is running on a proprietary driver and Netgear is planning to release the driver for Vista in Fall 2007! I have not desire to keep other computers this long on XP just to accommodate this slowest NAS wanna be of the house. Therefore I got this NSLU2 and USB drive combination.

I am going to install Debian on the NSLU2 and try to move some of the LAN functions such as firewall and DNS to it later.