Hi, it's been some time, but here i am again, with
a customer review of the
TEAC HD35-NAS, a network hard drive minus the blinky-shinynes of most other
vendors. The casing is made of aluminium, and is a little bigger than you
are used to from usb-only drives - i guess because it doubles as heat
absorber, the cooling fins suggest this. Despite of those,
there still
is a small, yet pretty loud fan in the rear of the casing...
It offers SMB and FTP Access to the disk, and doubles as a USB drive,
though you can't use both methods at the same time. As soon as you connect
the USB cable, the network is disabled. It can be configured to do DHCP
requests, and user managemenet for FTP and SMB is possible on a
per-directory basis. This, of course, is not enforced if used as USB disk,
so you still need to block physical access on LAN parties and the like if
you store sensitive data nex to your pr0n. This is especially true because
the
passwords of configured users are stored in PLAIN TEXT in a
file called nasuser.cfg in the root of the drive!
Another odd
thing, the 'public' directory is re-created in the root of the disc on
every boot-up. It's not shared automatically again, it's just created.
Helloo~oo, this needs to be called 'pub', not 'public'! ;-)
Network
access speed is lame. I never got more than 2.5 MB/s out of it. So i
ended up attaching it to my router via USB, and sharing it via the
router's samba. Not quite what i wanted... i don't get why most of these
devices don't have Gigabit ethernet, anyways - if i really need Gigabit
ethernet for anything, it's network disks! The device was so slow, I
couldn't play back movies using the Freecom Network MediaPlayer without
stuttering, they would play for a few minutes without any problems, but
then I needed to pause and resume constantly. The 2.5 MB/s was measured
with FTP and SAMBA, both under Linux and Windows.
The Firmware is
updatable either via the Web-Frontend or via TFTP.
I wouldn't really
suggest you try updating to the latest firmware, NAS-BASIC41, though. It
screwed my device. And with screwed i mean, it's now a usb-only casing
with a much too loud fan. No, there don't seem to be any rescue bootstrap
tftp requests. Even the power-light behind that big blue button doesn't
light up anymore. And yes, i had the prerequisites they mention on their
firmware
upgrade page. So i tried posting a support request on their web page,
which didn't yield a reply. Still searching for a solution, i wrote a mail
to support@teac.com which bounced with "599 Mailbox access for
support@teac.com refused", so i tried support@teac.de, which was
delivered on the 4th of July (which is not a holiday here :) at 14:10.
Here is the Mail:
From: Thomas Jakobi <thomas dot jakobi at hpc dot at>
To: support at freecom dot de
Subject: HD35-NAS BASIC41 firmware upgrade
hello,
a few months ago i bought a HD35-NAS, and despite the relatively slow network performance i was satisfied and the device fit my needs.
last week i noticed the firmware update to NAS-BASIC41, published on the 2nd of June 2006. As i already did the firmware updates to NAS-BASIC32
and NAS-BASIC34 without any problems, i immediately fetched the image. i had the required LOADER 067 (i double-checked) and tried to
upgrade.
The upgrade didn't seem to do any good though - my device does not do DHCP requests anymore, and a (pretty time-consuming) scan in the default
IP range (192.168.x.x) showed it hadn't allocated any of those, either.
It still works as a USB drive, but the blue led behind the 'power' switch doesn't even light up anymore!
I'm used to some kind of rescue TFTP GET built into embedded devices like these, but i couldn't see any using tcpdump.
HELP! Please don't tell me my disk has degraded to an oversized usb-disk! What are the magic buttons i have to touch so i can bootstrap the
firmware again?
The serial number of the device is: 50XXXX
Thomas
P.S.: i already wrote a message on the support sheet on your web page, but i didn't get a reply. please, don't make me feel sorry for my decision
to buy teac!
P.P.S.: i build embedded hardware myself, so you may just skip the marketing and redirect this to a technician, i will understand him/her.
No reply as of now. I'll let you know if they do. I don't think they will, i waited 2 weeks after posting a simliar text on their web page.
In summary, as you can guess, i do NOT recommend the drive.
