Product Review: Addonics NAS Adapter (NASU2)

In my quest for a cheap NAS solution for backing up multiple computers in our household, I eventually opted for the NAS Adapter offered by Addonics. The same device, with minor differences in outward appearance, is sold under a number of different brand names, including Icy Box from Raidsonic, Pearl, and Gearbox from Patriot Memory.

The device basically lets you connect an external USB drive to your network router or switch, making it accessible to any computer on your network. It can also act as a sort of a print server for printers supporting the USB interface. It also has a built-in Bit Torrent client, so downloads will run on the device rather than tying up a PC or server. This works well, but there does not seem to be any way to continue to seed files once a download completes. Finally, the NAS adapter also includes a built-in FTP service which can optionally be exposed to the internet, giving users a way to access their files from anywhere.

In theory, the external drive can be accessed from any computer on the local network, as long as it supports SMB drive shares. SMB is natively supported on Windows systems, and on other systems with an add-in client program (Samba is the most popular).

I connected this device to a Seagate FreeAgent 1 Terabyte drive. The product worked in that I could map drives from any computer on our network, and copy files to and from the NAS drive. There were two problems however, one of which has been resolved with a firmware upgrade, the other which has been somewhat mitigated.

No Date / Time Stamp Preservation
The first problem was the fact that files copied to the NAS drive always ended up with a new modification date/timestamp. This was a problem for backup software (I'm using Karen's Replicator) which uses the modification timestamp to determine which files nave changed since the previous run. It also made it impossible to search for older files by date. The latest firmware available from Addonics did not address this. I opened a support ticket with Addonics, and was contacted by their customer support team, who told me that there was no fix for this condition.

Fortunately, firmware from other vendors works on this device, although it takes a bit of hacking to make the Addonics device accept firmware branded by a rival vendor. I used a Pearl firmware update, but I had to use a hex editor to change the text "-BASIC" plus the next 3 characters to "-addonics". This makes the Addonics device think you are updating with a newer version of the Addonics firmware. Once this upgrade was complete, files copied to the NAS drive retained their original modification date / timestamps. Strangely, the creation time gets updated to the current time, but that doesn't seem to pose any problems.

Access from FreeBSD
The other problem was that the NAS device tended to lock up when I accessed it from our server running FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a port of Samba, but whenever I mounted the NAS drive, the device would lock up when performing any kind of bulk file copying. The newer firmware did not alleviate this problem, and web searches did not turn up other people experiencing this problem. It may very well be something wrong with my aging FreeBSD installation. I've worked around this by using the FTP interface to access the NAS drive from FreeBSD, which is working flawlessly.

With external drives costing less than $100 for a terabyte or more of storage, and this or similar devices for around $45, NAS storage is becoming affordable to many homes and smll businesses.