Digital Trends

Linksys NSLU2

June 26th, 2006 | by Brandon King

Currently shipping NSLU2s have the latest firmware installed, which is both good and bad. In the drive to make the device more suitable to average consumers, Linksys recently added support for FAT32 and NTFS, the two major drive formats supported in Windows, and the defaults of many external hard drive manufacturers. In previous versions, users had to reformat any drives attached to ext2, which is the default Linux format. On the surface, the additional formats sound like a good thing, but the implementation was slightly botched. According to Linksys tech support, the first USB port is meant to be readable and writable, and the second port only readable. There is no explicit reason for this setup, and it is not documented. Furthermore, this limitation does not exist for drives formatted in ext2. What's worse, these read/write limitations are not held up consistently. We had a discussion with tech support, during which we were clearly capable of doing things that we were not supposed to be able to do. So, the moral of the story is this: reformat to ext2. All of our headaches were relieved by simply following the most basic setup for the device. We are not letting Linksys off the hook for this snafu, as even though the problems with Fat32 and NTFS support are well documented, the firmware revisions have sat stagnant since July of 2005.

The Administration Screen

While this may appear to be a bleak of the poor Slug, the device, with the drives formatted to ext2, is a nice, stable solution for home users. The biggest boon is for homes with multiple PCs that want to share music or documents. Users can be allotted limited space, given specific access privileges, and allowed to access files without leaving a full PC on when no one is using it. The speed of the Slug, while slow, is sufficient to stream music, which means a single mp3 database can be kept accessible to Media Center PCs and laptops throughout the house. We were also able to stream high definition video in Divx, MPEG4, AVI, and Xvid to our Media Center PC with only some minor stuttering. We cannot fully recommend it for video streaming, since many demanding users will find the stuttering too distracting, and simultaneous writing from another computer causes the playback to suffer considerably, but know that it can be done.

Another note for Windows users: Windows does not natively recognize ext2 formatted drives, but there are freeware utilities that allow reading and writing to these drives. Check out the forum discussion associated with this review for more details. But, be aware that once you format your drives to ext2, Windows disk recovery utilities will no longer work, and the drive cannot be detached or plugged into PCs without the driver. One way around this is to have the driver on a USB key if you keep one handy. If you find yourself faced with a PC lacking ext2 support, you can install it yourself.

The NSLU2 Backup Screen