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For about 4 years now, I have had a 1.2 terrabyte array running with no issues. It’s comprised of four 400 gig seagate IDE drives and connected to a Promise Tech raid controller.

Welp, about 2 weeks ago drive 2 failed and I went out and got a replacement drive and rebuilt the array. Now, 4 years is a long time for a system to be running, so I started to look at other options.

I had been playing with the Linksys NSLU2 for a while. It’s a neat little device that has a network connector and 2 USB ports and allows you to hook up USB hard drives which you can access over your local network. The one great thing about this device is you can install an accessible linux (based on debian) system on this device to configure it to do all sorts of things. Basically, it’s a mini computer with a fully capable operating system on it.

So, I went out and bought 3 of these NSLU2’s (1 for practical use, 2 for testing). So I hooked up 2 Seagate 750 GB external drives to the main one and configured it to be our file server here in our network.  This has been working out well, the only downside is that the Seagate externals go into sleep mode after 10 mins and it takes like 15 to 30 seconds to bring the drive back online when connecting to the NSLU2. (I will be working on this later)

On the other 2 NSLU2’s (slugs as we have reffered to them) I loaded the “unslug” firmware which gives me access to the Linux OS on the slug and the second I loaded DebianSlug and am beginning to play with Linux on these small devices.

All in all, it’s working out well.  I am also working on upgrading our servers in Dallas to newer faster systems.  I will post more on this as that project nears completion.