Compusa External Network Storage Enclosure

[kwag]

Hi guys,

Thought I'd write a review of this little gizmo I bought yesterday at a local CompUSA for ~$120.00 (US price is $99.00.)
What caught my attention was what I saw written on the box:

* Featuring Built-In FTP server and Samba Server Capabilities

This is the box, model SKU 334218:



The beauty of this thing, is that you don't need any drivers on your PCs to access it, because it has built-in Samba server
Just put in any hard drive (up to a max size of 320GB), and you have yourself a standalone storage on your LAN.
It even has a WEB server

Here are screenshots from my box:










And now, to my surprise, look what happened when I telnet to the box



So I logged in as admin and the password I set up on the WEB panel, then I typed in help and several commands, and look what we have



What we really have here is a tiny/embedded WEB server/Samba server and FTP server on a ~$100.00 plus the cost of any hard drive
This beats just about any full SMB (Unix/Linux) dedicated PC, because of small size and power consumption.
Right now I'm using the box for backups from three different PCs, and it's working like a charm

Edit: Just noticed that it also provides a DHCP server

-kwag

[Dialhot]

Hi Karl,

What filesystems are supported ?

[kwag]

Hi Phil,

The hard drive is formatted as FAT32 only.
I know that's not the best choice, but depends on how you see it. As far as transportability, that's a plus, because the drive can be read/written anywhere. You could pull it out and read it on just about any operating system.

-kwag