Icybox NAS Alternative????

Slime101

Slime101

Slime101

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Having had disasterous results with the truely appauling icybox* nas im after an alternative solution.

It must take 2 drives, offer raid 1 as an option and have a usb printer port - other than that i'm not overly fussed. It'll be used with 2x WD green drives.

*Icybox - rubbish solution, wholly unrelaible despite using the latest firmware and their "safe list" drives, it lost the drives, it refused to work reliably, spin down didnt work, print was unrelaible and was generally total garbage, the company doesnt deserve to be in business if the others are anthing like that!
 
Sorry, forgot that vital detail - upto £130ish as i already have the drives.

I've seen the D-Link DNS 323, is it any good?
 
Not really, i want somthing tiny and cheap to run as itll be on 24/7 so dont really want to power a full PC or find a home for one either.
 
If you don't mind me asking what problems were you having with the Icybox, I assume you mean the 4220? These are actually fantastic NAS boxes, they have bugs and incompatibilities but they are all well documented and completely avoidable with no hassle once you know what drives to use with them etc.

There is a wiki if you seach google for "nas4220 + wiki" with a forum and lots of advice and information on custom applications you can put on there etc as well as drives to avoid and ones that are known to work well and all that jazz.

Sorry if I'm flogging a dead horse and you already seem to have the drives, just curious :)

You could try the, Synology\Qnap ones but you will find that all the cheap NAS devices have their own issues, be it bugs or ridiculously slow transfer rates, there is no "golden egg"
 
hernaldo said:
If you don't mind me asking what problems were you having with the Icybox, I assume you mean the 4220? These are actually fantastic NAS boxes, they have bugs and incompatibilities but they are all well documented and completely avoidable with no hassle once you know what drives to use with them etc.

There is a wiki if you seach google for "nas4220 + wiki" with a forum and lots of advice and information on custom applications you can put on there etc as well as drives to avoid and ones that are known to work well and all that jazz.

Sorry if I'm flogging a dead horse and you already seem to have the drives, just curious :)

You could try the, Synology\Qnap ones but you will find that all the cheap NAS devices have their own issues, be it bugs or ridiculously slow transfer rates, there is no "golden egg"
Click to expand...

Problems were endless - the drives i purchased were on the "safe list" - they didnt work.

NAS lost drives repeatedly
NAS lost data because it lost drives
NAS wouldnt spin down drives
NAS refused to appear on network on numerous occasions needing reboots
Print server unreliable
NAS lost admin password and physical hard reset doesnt actually work to reset the password, just all the settings

The list goes on - its well documented as a very unrelaible veryt tempramental poorly designed, badly supported system that should never have gone on sale. It doesnt work with most HDD's on the market, has new firmware every few weeks tofix the never ending list of problems but never seems to work properly.

I will have a look at the Qnap and Synology solutions, i was also quite interested in the Linksys by Cisco solutions they have until i saw the price....:eek:
 
Slime101 said:
Problems were endless - the drives i purchased were on the "safe list" - they didnt work.

NAS lost drives repeatedly
NAS lost data because it lost drives
NAS wouldnt spin down drives
NAS refused to appear on network on numerous occasions needing reboots
Print server unreliable
NAS lost admin password and physical hard reset doesnt actually work to reset the password, just all the settings

The list goes on - its well documented as a very unrelaible veryt tempramental poorly designed, badly supported system that should never have gone on sale. It doesnt work with most HDD's on the market, has new firmware every few weeks tofix the never ending list of problems but never seems to work properly.

I will have a look at the Qnap and Synology solutions, i was also quite interested in the Linksys by Cisco solutions they have until i saw the price....:eek:
Click to expand...

I had a 4220 too. Originally bought samsung drives before I realised they were basically broken with this unit, but not before a good few days of pain and broken RAID. I then replaced them with some WD 1000FYPS drives about 9 months ago. These were fine until about a month back when once again, it started dropping the RAID setup. SMART tested fine, and once RAID was rebuilt it worked fine for a day or two... and then, for no apparent reason it would drop the RAID again. I got so sick of this box that I recently ditched it and bought a synology 207+ and transplanted the WD drives into it. So far, all seems fine. The Admin UI is substantially better, and RAID seems to work flawlessly so far. It also has a far richer feature set, and a fantastic support forum full of user generated add ons. Synology actually encourages people to extend the functionality of their units, and regularly roll out new firmware with better features.

Was considering the Synology when I bought the 4220 at half the price. Now I've ended up buying both. Wish I'd made the extra investment a year ago.

I read every forum and wiki there was. My concusion is that the 4220 is a badly supported piece of unreliable rubbish. Avoid!

ps. Hernaldo... want a 4220? Going cheap?

Andy.
 
Most cheaper NAS devices are rubbish (and the icyboxes are horrendous, one died on me within 2 days of getting it, one bricked on updating firmware and the one I have now (that sucessfully updated - which resolves some of the worst problem) still has many problems like listed above... even the ones that work well usually have bad transfer rates (the last qnap one I tried would start at around 40Mbit/s and after a short amount of uptime drop to 4.5-5Mbit/s and stay there until rebooted).

I highly reccomend building a PC around a barebones system (to save space) as the end result is of a much higher quality even tho its gonna cost more money to get up and running.
 
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If i went barebones it would have to be totally silent, tiny, and very efficient power wise....is that possible for not a lot of money??
 
Slime101 said:
Problems were endless - the drives i purchased were on the "safe list" - they didnt work.
Click to expand...


http://www.openfiler.com/
looks to be worth a look (as does the http://www.freenas.org/ mentioned earlier)
Microsoft do their Home Server product if you like the automated PC backup idea

(can someone confirm this is OEM software please ? as otherwise if it was Retail I might be very tempted to buy it - but I don't want the hassle of M$ OEM software licensing tied to dead hardware for example)

The icybox sufers the same problesms as all linux NAS boxes, there is some incompatibilty between the drives spin down and linux (or something like that)
Qnap and Synology seem better made but you pay double, still relatively cheap for what is really a slow PC and some neat software.

having worried about the same issues as you (and not being willing to lose data at any price) I intend trying out the OpenFiler product first on an old barton box

silence/cooling is less of an issue for me, as I'd probably bung it in the outhouse :)
 
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Slime101 said:
If i went barebones it would have to be totally silent, tiny, and very efficient power wise....is that possible for not a lot of money??
Click to expand...
I'm also looking for something small and power efficient RAID1. About to test a Home Server setup, but I'm concerned about the power consumption if left on 24/7.
 
I run a synology 106 model 24/7 have never had problems with it since march 07 when bought from here. have a 120 gb hard drive I put in then . old HD :-)
 
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