I disabled the extra JMicron SATA ports and rebooted. Still, there were the two unrecognized devices and the DBAN crash.

I disabled the Intel fake-RAID. No luck.

There are two USB 3 ports on this board and two unrecognized devices... maybe DBAN is enumerating those improperly. Disabled, and no luck.

Where the hell are these generic SD and generic CF devices coming from???

Then SMACK! It hit me...

The Dell monitor I just bought has card readers on-board. Unplugging the USB cable from the monitor caused the unrecognized devices to go-away, and DBAN is now running as I type this.

I'm not sure why DBAN just doesn't ignore any devices that it clearly knows are "unrecognized" and there's even a feature request for it that was filed back in 2.0 or so. Regardless, it's an excellent tool and everyone should use it before selling/giving-away a drive that may contain personal information.

Oh well... maybe this helps someone else. Oh, and don't forget that many USB printers have card readers on them also, so if you're having problems with DBAN crashing, unplug anything USB and see if that helps.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and bought a real NAS for use at home. I decided on the QNAP TS-219P for a number of reasons I'll discuss in the post. Also, I have plenty of screenshots showing the QNAP UI and a couple simple benchmarks comparing the performance to a USB disk attached to an Airport Extreme.

When it comes to a home server, I've usually gone the "cheap" route. That means building my own server from old PC parts, setting up my own OS, and maintaining it myself. I've had good luck with this and certainly learned a ton about FreeBSD, Linux, and other stuff doing this.

But, the problem is that those old PCs take up space, make noise, and eat electricity.

One day, I decided that I was tired of paying the electric bills and having that big mid-tower server sitting around in my way. After all, for a home "server" I just need network storage to dump files on for the most part. Sure, it's nice to have an SSH server or the occasional thing like that, but not critical compared to the storage component.

That's why I've been using a Guardian MAXimus hardware RAID 1 USB disk attached to my Apple Airport Extreme (AEX) router. The Guardian Max gave me the mirrored RAID I wanted for my network storage since the AEX doesn't do anything with RAID at all.

Since I had the router turned-on all the time, attaching a disk to it for network use seemed like a good solution. I could ditch that huge PC and just have the AEX "airdisk".

This worked fine for about a year, and then I got fed-up with the slow Time Machine backups and the fact that the AEX router spins the disks down after some ridiculously short period of time like five minutes. Every time I tried to access the disk, I had to wait for them to spin up and become available. Then, once they were up, the performance was, uhh, shall we say "lackluster" at about 3-5 MB/sec.

One day, I stumbled across the QNAP line of dedicated NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliances. These were exactly what I wanted. Small, very low power, handled RAID, and could even do stuff like run SSH servers, websites, and other stuff. And, the key thing: they were reasonably priced (note I said "reasonably" not "cheap").

So, after much research and basically finding only good reviews of the QNAP series, I opted for the $400 TS-219P. This toaster-sized box features two hot-swappable bays and an ARM processor. The OS is Linux under the hood, but the appealing thing after adminning my own boxes was NOT having to admin this one! It is basically a plug-and-chug storage appliance.

Today, after upgrading to the QNAP, my Time Machine syncs are super snappy, I can set the disk spin-down time, and my direct SMB transfers are in the neighborhood of 25-32 MB/sec. Much better! The QNAP works with my Mac, Windows and Linux machines for storage, plus it provides an SSH tunnel server for private surfing on the road. I can also use it to share files with family members using a web interface rather than FTP or something like that. I generally don't even log into the admin interface for weeks at a time -- because the QNAP just sits there, day in and day out, doing its thing exactly as I want it to. It gives me no hassles - I get enough of those from my day job!

Anyway, I wanted to provide some screenshots showing the UI as well as a couple simple benchmarks using Xbench.

First, here is the old benchmark using the Airport Extreme router with the disk attached. Note that the hardware RAID1 enclosure was not the limiting factor in any way:

Now, here is the new and improved benchmark using the QNAP on the same network/etc.:

Much better, huh?

Here's a random screenshot I took to show how the QNAP appears in Winbloze since the rest of my screenshots are taken from OS X:

QNAP includes a program called the QFinder which locates the NAS when first run and allows you to configure it even if you don't know the IP address/etc.

Next up, we see the pics of the actual QNAP administration UI. I went through every menu so that you can see what the various options are. I forgot the System Administration menu, so that's last. I was too excited setting-up my new toy and taking all the screenshots was getting tiresome. Note the nerd goodliness of iSCSI, remote syslog, etc.

Well, I hope that all this work answers a question someone has or helps them decide whether a QNAP NAS is the right choice or not. If you buy one (or not), I'd appreciate your using the link to Amazon below as a means to say "thanks for all the screenshots"!

"TS 219P- NAS (Network Attached Storage) Superior Performance All-in-One Server with iSCSI for SOHO and Home Users" (Qnap Systems)

"TS 439 Pro- Turbo NAS (Network Attached Storage) - Superior performance server with iSCSI for Business" (QNAP Systems)

P.S. this is my first post written with Ecto. I had to do some stuff manually in WP that I couldn't figure-out in Ecto. Let me know if you have any trouble.

I've been considering building a NAS box for use at home for some time. In the past, I ran an old Celeron 300A system with FreeNAS which was did pretty well with power consumption, but it definitely wasn't "fast". So, I've been on the lookout for something with a bit more processing power that's also easy on the wallet as far as monthly electrical consumption.

So, when I heard about this $60 motherboard and Via C7 combination, I had to check it out. The Via C7 runs at 1.5GHz and while it isn't designed to compete with the other power-house processors on the market, it sips power at a rate that would barely register with one of those. One source I found rated the C7 at around 22 watts which definitely fits my desires for low power consumption and heat dissipation.

Anyway, the board was originally part of the $200 Linux machine from Everex, which was targeted to run a customized Ubuntu Linux distro to provide web surfing and access to the Google Apps (gmail, spreadsheet, etc.) So, we know it'll run Linux just fine, but if you are so inclined, you can also burden it with Windows XP or 98 -- just not Vista. The custom Linux OS called gOS is downloadable or you could choose to install a standard distribution.

I figure that popping this into a micro-ATX case with some good, quiet fans around the hard drives, and you've got a nice small NAS box that will also serve-up videos and other stuff that you'd expect from a full-featured server. The 1.5GHz C7 should have adequate oomph for serving many streams/files/printers simultaneously. Not bad for a $60 foundation.

Now, if only I could find one of those cool hard-drive centric cases with the drive trays (like they use to build the pre-made NAS boxes), which will also hold a micro-ATX board, and I'm set!

Get more info on the TC2502 Linux board. Thanks to Make for posting this.

It's incredibly hard to find a good e-mail client. I read something at one time (perhaps from the mutt authors) that "all e-mail clients suck, ours just sucks less." That's very true IMO and it's even harder to find one that's decent and free (I do like mutt for text mail BTW ). Thunderbird aims to solve both issues.

I've been using the 1.5 beta for some time now and found it pretty good. It's not significantly changed from earlier versions, at least from my admittedly basic use, but it does appear to be stable and fully usable. The release version appears identically usable (so far).

For those who don't already know, TB is a non-nonsense, basic mail reader, which is what many people prefer. Mail readers that try to do everything, and end-up doing it poorly like Outlook (jeez, the Options settings alone in Outlook 2003 are hideously organized!) are a dime-a-dozen. TB just does mail and usenet, and does them well -- although with the built-in extension support, I'm sure you can force it to do other things if so desired.

Improvements in 1.5 include:

• Binary patching, like FireFox 1.5 does. Means smaller downloads and faster updates than before.
• Interactive spell checking, similar to the red underlining that MS Word does.
• Various security updates, both for the program itself and also helping to expose phishing scams.
• Other goodies listed here.

I have no reason not to suggest that you try it out if you use Outlook Express currently. It will import your Outlook Express settings, contacts and mail effortlessly while providing you with a significantly improved security framework that does not encourage spyware, suckware, and malware to enter your machine.

If you're an existing Thunderbird user, I also recommend upgrading to 1.5 based upon the experiences I've had. You will likely find it very comfortable to use if you liked earlier versions.