Today I got my Linksys Network Attached Storage device (NAS200) in the mail. I got it for just under 99 US$ through mwave.com. This NAS200 will hold a terabyte of data. I have two Seagate 500 GB SATA 3Gb/s HDD’s coming on Monday that I ordered for 72 US$ each through MemoryLabs.com. I will set them up as a redundant array of inexpensive disks (RAID) with mirroring (RAID 1). This will let me mirror one drive onto the other. If one drive fails or becomes corrupt, the other will still permit me to keep on working. I will then be able to purchase a new hard drive and rebuild the array when it arrives without any down time!
Previously, I had a Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 (NSLU2). This is more commonly known as a slug. The NSLU2 is also made by Linksys and is the predecessor to the NAS200. Actually, there was a EFG120, but it was limited to 120 GB of storage (with ability to add an additional 120 GB drive). I had purchased the slug after my brother gave me a 250 GB USB HDD from I/O Magic (I250HD35).
The HDD is pretty much failing. I can read from it for 10 seconds, and then it takes 5 minutes before it continues to let me read from it. The process repeats itself and the times are not always exact. It’s simply very short read, very long pause. I found a EXT Installable File System (IFS) driver that let me read the drive’s EXT3 file format through windows. Again, I had the same problem. Read for a little, wait for a lot.
I tried to copy the entire contents to a folder on my computer. After a few hours, I looked and noticed that the dialog stated it would take two weeks before it completed the copy process. That was a little unreliable. Many things can happen in two weeks, and I wouldn’t know what files were and were not copied if anything interrupted the process.
I created a small program to scan through the USB drive and compare the contents with a folder on my computer. If a file was missing, it copied it. It appears after five days, I have 72 of 95 GB copied. I have had to stop and start the program a few times, and was grateful that the tool was able to skip over files that were already copied. I found that the .Net framework has a flaw in its’ System.IO.File.Copy method. It assumes that the source is a windows file system. I ran into a problem trying to copy a file path that was longer than 247 characters. It is not possible to have such a long path in a windows partition such as FAT or NTFS. EXT3 however does not have this limitation. I assumed I could copy the file and paste it with a truncated length to fit within the 247 character limitation. I was wrong. The source of the Copy operation is also restricted to 247 characters.
The end result is that I am not able to copy these files. After all the data is retrieved, I will go back and manually find these files and copy them through a Linux OS. I’ll also be working on CRC or some kind of data integrity check to verify that the files copied are intact.
[...] week, I got a network storage system (NAS200). I have since set it up to be RAID 1 with mirroring. During the setup process, it asked if [...]