Having recently left the hussle and/or hassle of working from an office full of people, and into my own home office hundreds of kilometers away, I found I needed a few more network supplies than I used to require. During this transition, I also migrated away from running my own server and into a hosted environment. This left me with only my desktop PC and my work Thinkpad running, which means I couldn’t use my server for backups anymore. After many minutes of searching, I came upon the Dlink DSM-G600 NAS device, which ran Linux, and used Samba for network shares, and came at a decent price. I just bought a Dlink Gamer Lounge gigabit wireless router, I figured another Dlink would make an excellent choice. I wasn’t totally wrong.
I ordered a 500G drive to put inside it, thinking I could use the 2 USB2.0 ports for expansion later if I needed it. The setup software went through alright and I had it up and running in no time. Loading up the web interface, I wondered if this was made by the same company as the Gamer Lounge. It’s just terrible. Nothing is where you think it should be, and it’s all very basic stuff. Looking for the share configuration, I wasn’t impressed to see a full share of the entire drive open read/write to everyone. A quick firmware upgrade, just cause I like doing that, and I set out to start copying data over. Using the network shares first, from my WinXPsp2 desktop, I found the share quickly. My data transfer ran about 6-7M/s according to gkrellm. Not exactly the gigabit performance I was looking for. Trying FTP instead (cause it’s a bad idea to copy 50G+ over a network share), I hoped for faster speeds, but was disappointed again. 6-7M/s. This is barely 100M network speeds.
I was pleased to see I could create email alerts, but was disappointed to see I couldn’t change the SMTP port, which I have to do on Bell Sympatico, since I use my hosted server for a mail server. Suppose I could try and figure out Bell’s mail servers, but it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
Despite all these negatives, I’m going to keep it, and hope firmware updates will make things better. If not, there’s always a few hacking projects out there that may eventually provide a decent software base for it. I’m not running it as a media centre storage (though you can), I’m just rysncing my pictures to it every now and then.
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