My initial thoughts on a low cost Hammer N1200 NAS unit
Posted By RichC on July 10, 2009
Sometimes the best laid plans can go awry when you’ll not reading the details. My Achilles’s heel is ‘a good buy’ when it comes to tools and technology gear and the Hammer N1200 empty’ myshare’ NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit seemed to be fitting into my planned purchase since I had two spare 250GB 3.5 inch drives sitting around. It looked like an attractive purchase since it was networkable and only $160 … plus came with a 320GB Western Digital portable Passport drive. Assuming the Passport goes for about $80 to$120 and I’m always glad to have an extra WD Passport drive, then the Hammer N1200 was going to cost me $50 – 80!
Whoa … no so fast (after the order was placed of course) … let’s pay attention since my spare hard drives are IDE drives and and the Hammer N1200 need SATA drives that means I now have to also purchase a couple of matching hard drives. Not a big deal, but certainly not the “deal” that I had in mind. Nevertheless, I’m upping the size in hopes that they will store data for a long time without having to be swapped.
One of the nice aspects of setting up a networked storage device is that I can use it with the several different operating systems I have running at the house … Windows, Mac and Linux. The interface to the Linux OS ‘myshare’ device is easily accomplished by accessing the IP after plugging into your network. Much like setting up a router or access point one runs through a few set up options in order to secure access to the interface and issue network permissions by user and groups.
Another plus is that the the networked drive can be configured for remote access to the files through FTP (or SMB or NSF). Since I purchase a couple of new 1.5TB drives ($115 ea), I opted to mirror the drive for data protection or duplication. This really was the primary reason for needing a new back-up drive anyway. I’m also planning to use it as a primary for video editing content (lost on the crash of my last external harddrive without backups) but this may be a problem. Unfortunately my network is only a 100baseT and Fast Ethernet and not the desired 1000baseT ‘Gigabit Ethernet’ network. We’ll see how long I can hold off upgrading?
In setting up the “mirror” drive, the Hammer N1200 goes through a very long ‘resyncing’ process (above). In fact it probably took a good 6 to 8 hours to prepare the drives — if the extended storage mode is used, the drives are ready immediately, but there’s no recovery option without plugging in a USB back-up drive (option on the N1200).
So far it is running … but a true workout will have to wait until after my vacation.
Here’s a decent review.
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