Mini review of Sans Digital MN2L NAS enclosure

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Lesterp

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 22, 2004
Messages
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I recently needed a RAID1 capable NAS enclosure so I went a hunting for reviews and stumbled on smallnetbuilder.com which is a killer resource for networking gear reviews.

After reading through a bunch of reviews it seemed that either a QNAP TS-209 or a Synology DS-207 were the way to go, but both cost close to $400 without drives. I found the QNAP at MWAVE.COM for $350 after rebate and was going to pull the trigger when I saw a Sans Digital enclosure with the same basic functionality as the others for $188. Searching around revealed that this is a new product, and there was NO user experiences to be found anywhere which was a bummer. Regardless, I bought it and slapped 2 WD7500AAKS sata drives I had into it. The admin web browser based app is fairly straight forward, there is a Raid Management page where I setup RAID1 and I was off and running. Besides a few rough places in the user interface (the occasional Engrish instructions(check out engrish.com for a few laughs)) it works well.

It has iTunes server capability so now my music library is remote as well as all digital pix and other data that is nice to have off of my main rig (which gets broken occasionally and needs a clean install).

As far as performance goes, it does about 8mb/sec transfer rate over a 10/100 network. I am sure if I upgraded all my gear to Gigabit (this NAS is a gigabit device) it would improve accordingly. I pulled the enclosure apart and snapped some pix as well.

Worth noting, it is a rebadged Stardom SL3620 (external product shots can be seen there) also sold by RaidSonic in Europe. Note in the picture that the motherboard is labeled SL3620. The CPU is a Storlink 3516 which is an integrated chip that has an ARM processor of unknown speed and usb/nic etc also integrated. The motherboard also has 128mb of ddr onboard. It runs a linux 2.6.xxx based OS that almost all of these type of NAS devices seem to run. It also has a little 70watt psu squeezed into what is a really small enclosure, built out of heavy gauge aluminium - very good overall build quality. It has 2 exhaust fans which are a bit on the loud side, but I located this thing in the garage. The OS is accessed via web browser like all small network appliances. It reads SMART data from the drives and in a relatively cool garage, the drives never get above 40c. Finally i pulled one drive from the RAID1 to see how it notifies you of drive/RAID failure, and despite trying to set up email and popup notifiers, my only indication was the front LED turning from blue to purple. The rebuild took about 6 hours. All in all it seems like a decent device, worth the $188.

ps. I wouldn't recommend this unit to the non tech savy, the interface is way too barebones.







 
I have two of the QNAP boxes. I wouldn't give them up for any other...

There's a lot of nice boxes out there though.
 
That seems like it would fit my bill perfectly. Thanks for the review.

UPDATE: I am a tech whore and have ordered one.
 
My unit should be showing up today so I will post how well it works with the two 1TB drives I have waiting for it.
 
Here is a small update. I received the unit yesterday but had little time to actually poke about. The installation was fairly straightforward.

Assembly: The drive cages are released from the enclosure by a simple "key" that is nothing more than a short plastic probe with a flat handle. This is inserted into the hole on the front face which in turn pops out the lever allowing you to remove the drive cage. The drive cages were somewhat disappointing from a quality standpoint. They both come with a square plastic piece screwed in with four screws. This is done because the mounts are a U-shaped setup where both sides are very thin and flimsy. The drive itself gives the whole unit its rigidity. The screws that were already in the mounts were of poor quality. The combination of slot design and the amount of torque required on all the ones easily started to strip them out. The extra ones provided did not seem to have this problem. Once the two 1TB Hitachi drives were installed, the cages slid smoothly into their respective slots and locked in via the cage level.

As was stated previously, the device is a tad on the loud side. The temperature level of the device and drives stays well within acceptable levels.

Configuration: There have been a fair amount of anomalies with this unit so far. As stated by Lesterp, the management interface is accessed via a web browser. The unit defaults to DHCP. [NOTE: If you do not have an DHCP server available they do provide a simple utility that will find the unit on your network and allows you to configure the network settings that way.] Once into the system, the first thing I did was set the network settings to a static IP which required me to reauthenticate to the new address. Next, I entered the drive management area and instructed the device to create a new RAID 1 configuration. It then began to prepare and format the drives for use. Once this was completed the device rebooted itself as per the manual.

Here is where the first hiccup occurred for me. Once the device started its reboot cycle, it displayed a page stating that it could take up to 3 minutes and that I should click the logon button after that time should the page fail to refresh automatically. The page did not refresh so I hit the button and watched as the browser reported that it timed out attempting to connect. After a bit of headscratching I check my network logs and saw that the DHCP server had renewed a lease for the device. Redirected my browser to that address resulted in the login page. So, the device failed to truly save the network settings I had applied even though I had access it on that static address. I reconfigured it again and reboot for good measure. This time the configuration appeared to have stuck.

The device comes with some default share, user, and service configurations. I am planning on using mine for straight data, media share for my MediaGate, torrents, and iTunes. I was only able to check out the data and torrent functionality so far.

The data seems straight forward. You can create users and groups. These can then be granted either read or read-write permissions to any share. I was successful in accessing a number of test shares. Transfer rates on a gigabit network (w/o jumbo frames) seems sufficient but I will try to get some tests done at some point.

The torrent server is straightforward. You simply enable it where upon it will automatically create a new share, browse to a torrent file on your local system that will be uploaded, then select the start button. Up to 5 torrents are listed as being allowed at one time. You can set upload and download rate limits. I attempted two different torrents as tests. The first, a simple 40MB test, was quickly retrieved and easily accessible via the share. The second test consisted of a 1GB series of files. This is where the second major issue arose. Once I clicked the start button for that torrent, the device became inaccessible from the network. I could see the torrent activity on the network level but I was unable to regain connection via the web browser even after the torrent appeared to have stopped. Power cycling the device corrected the state without any apparent ill affect.

Once I have had more time I will utilize the iTunes service and report any more findings.
 
mine is still chugging along fine. itunes is working well. i just swapped out my pc for a first gen intel imac (running vista via bootcamp) and the NAS plays well with leopard.
 
I've had one of these for a couple of months now, and it has been working great. The engrish is a little annoying, but amusing. The reason I purchased this is because I wanted a low-power small server that I could use for sharing files between my computers as well as handle my torrent and backup needs.

I already had a linux box that sort-of served this purpose, but I hate leaving a big box powered on 24/7. I can stick this nas in the closet, power it on and forget about it.

The only complaint I have so far is that I would like more control over the box. The web interface is ok, but the torrent client needs some tweaking.
It seems like the max up/down settings are for each torrent running instead of a global setting. ex: set it at 30KB and each torrent can download at that rate. I also doubt that the torrent traffic is encrypted like you can do with some other clients.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to get command-line access to be able to modify configuration and add/replace applications? I've seen examples of other nas devices hacked using scripts or serial port...but nothing about the MN2L yet.

edit: If anyone is interested, you can enable the Telnet process using a web browser. I havent finished modifying my system, but its a start:
1-Browse to the nas and login
2-Change path to http://192.168.2.111/html/telnet/telnet.html (replace IP with yours) and select the checkbox, then click the button.
3-This will take you to http://192.168.2.111/cgi/telnet/telnet.cgi where you may need to click the checkbox and button again, looks like you can change the port too if needed.
 
Thank you very much for this news.
After receiving negative response from the Stardom customer care (both German and Chinese), I was giving up to use this product only as shared storage.
As you remark, the points of failure of this product are:
  • the bittorrent client, which usually hangs up, stop every activity and is ONLY supported by Internet Explorer
  • the mail system that doesn't work
  • the dapp server that doesn't support id3 tag
  • the mail system, that doesn't work
  • a mysterious ldp server, that doesn't work

Did you find any other "secret page"? In fact the /html/ section was quite hidden, unless you could exploit in some way the firmware files...

Bye,
Chemtrail
 
Not all features are broken. Some works well, the others sometimes create problems :)
Now I can finally check for the problems and develop or deploy some "ad-hoc" application.
Maybe an amule version like ofr the Synology models...
 
"Did you find any other "secret page"? In fact the /html/ section was quite hidden, unless you could exploit in some way the firmware files..."

there are a few other pages not linked to in the web interface, but none as useful as the telnet one. You can take a look at what is there by telneting in as admin and browsing to /usr/webroot.
after trying to crack the root password I finally realized it gets changed to be the same as admin when you update admin...so you should have root telnet access using the same password as admin
 
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