Comments on: Freecom Network Drive Pro 500 Gb - a sad story

By: Marcus Durant

Marcus Durant — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:48:08 +0000

Hey guys, its time to stop griping about it.

its all fixed now

first official firmware release 4.4.2 fixes all

(previous beta release was the fix actually 3.8.4

even the source code is out.

& ipkg packages are on line, not all work at the moment ie the C++ ones, but its being worked on by a strong community.

Now i do recomend this drive, its as good as it should have been 3 months ago , lol

but i’m glad i hung in there

By: Dejan Vesić

Dejan Vesić — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 06:41:10 +0000

In any case, pass Freecom drive - they are simply not serious enough when it comes to serious stuff: our data.

By: Cary Moore

Cary Moore — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:59:39 +0000

Well, I got mine yesterday (Network Drive Pro 1TB). Firmware 4.7.2 and I can confirm the above issue as far as I’ve tested with the ND and Vista.

There also seems to be occasions where copied files are padded with additional bytes (zeroes).

And the network performance is awful (max ~60mbps on a gigabit LAN)

Luckily DABS (dabs4work.com) incorrectly sent me a previously returned drive (it had “Net Drive 4″ written in blue marker pen on the top) so they will be getting the unit back and I think I will be paying a bit extra for a Netgear ReadyNAS unit (but need to do a bit of homework first!

Shame, but this unit is definitely “unfit for purpose”.

By: Dejan Vesić

Dejan Vesić — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 13:21:19 +0000

Good for you Paul

But, if you do have 4.2.7 firmware, I strongly suggest to test drive in a way stated in post.

You won’t get corruption straight away, only if you are saving new (shorter) version of file over longer.

Regards,
Dejan

By: Paul Thomas

Paul Thomas — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:49:37 +0000

Well, my drive is great - it works well.
You have http, ftp, ssh access etc. etc. which you don’t get anywhere else without hacking the firmware.
I get up to 50Mbps data rates which is fine.
I can access it from XP, Vista and Ubuntu and so far no data corruption problems at all.
I don’t use it as a backup - I use it as my main network fileserver and backup from it to an external USB drive.
The only problem I had was that the built in Backup to it’s own USB port is not very intuative and doesn’t give you much info on what’s going on.
Apart from that it’s far better than alternatives such as Maxtor and Western Digital that lock you down totally.
Cool drive!

By: Dejan Vesić

Dejan Vesić — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:42:39 +0000

Well, one thing that came out of this Freecom NAS experiment is conclusion that I really love real server

Apart from space (major obstacle) and price (still in trial mode, so free) all other points are on side of decent, stable and full-proof server.

So, staying with Windows Home

By: Aleksandar

Aleksandar — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:57:14 +0000

I use D-Link’s DNS-323 NAS. It too have finicky firmware and had its share of teething problems when it was introduced. For instance, its ext3 support was so buggy that eventually D-Link decided it’s not worth the trouble and completely disabled it in 1.03 firmware, leaving ext2 as only option.

1.03 is not perfect either and we (owners of this little box) ope that D-Link will release 1.04 somewhere in 2008. It takes them about 1 year per each 0.01 release.

Good side is very active community at http://forum.dsmg600.info/f3-DNS-323-General-Discussion.html so it’s bearable. Takes very little space and has Gigabit ethernet.

By: Dejan Vesić

Dejan Vesić — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:53:33 +0000

Well, I gave up of NAS solution. Will build machine with 2 x 500Gb disks in RAID 1, energy efficient processor (AMD LE or similar) and put Windows Home Server or something like that - it should not cost more than 150€ on top of Freecom NDP 500 price.

Only problem is space (you need to find space for yet another machine).

On other side, you have full blown machine and not NAS like Freecom one.

By: Torben Schon

Torben Schon — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:27:41 +0000

Have the same problems - could anybody advice on a different NDP/NAS brand that have the same capabilities and features as supposed to be contained in the Freecom solution - but actually works?

By: Marcus Durant

Marcus Durant — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:20:12 +0000

Awfull
I seriously advice anyone thinking of buying this to think again.
On paper it looks like a pretty nifty bit of kit, in reality it has come to market far to early & is plagued with bugs.

a 300gb file takes 40 seconds to write to the hard drive, yet it take 7 minutes to write the same file to a usb stick plugged into its “usb 2.0″ ports

if you overwrite a file with a modified but smaller version of the same file, it doesn’t, it just looses your newer version and keeps the old!

gigabit lan users may be interested to know hat when writing to the HD, your network utilisation will be approx 6%.

I so far have lost 1 ISO file to the NDP, due to a cyclic redundancy check, after moving the iso file from 1 directory to another!

there are a host of other issues

please check the forums before you buy, this should be a good product when the bugs are ironed out, but for a “PRO” device (laugh) the bugs should be ironed out before release.

http://forum.freecompromo.com/viewforum.php?f=1
http://www.openfsg.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=23&sid=7cbe9d01a8d21bf5503bb6db636c4f90

THis firmware version 4.7.2 (I think) should be a beta release, Its just so shocking.

By: Dejan Vesić

Dejan Vesić — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:59:47 +0000

I can confirm that WLAN was unstable; transfer over 100Mb was around 5Mb/sec.

It is ridiculous that companies selling what should be most important - place for your data - are so bad in testing their own software before releasing product.

I know that time to market is very important, but not _that important_

By: OrosAraba

OrosAraba — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:39:40 +0000

I have the 1tb datatank gateway from Freecom. I too was VERY anscious to get this piece of hardware, but ever since receiving it, it’s just been “ow bummer” every time I look into the next service it provides.
Something as simple as ftpserver. This units configuration for the ftp-server includes
enable yes/no
enable to outside yes/no
port number _____
and that is it ladies and gentlemen!
I lmao when I saw this.
The wlan is unstable - when working, but with current firmware it switches off completely every 2-3 days. Even thou it states gigabit lan, I wasn’t able to copy data faster than 12,5mb/sec to the tank, or in other words, ½ usb data transfer rate. This was using a computer ofc with gbit lan, a cat6 stp cable (state of the art).
The dhcp server doesn’t offer client address reservation from mac. And on top of that, it offers addresses totally random over the range. Give it range x.x.x.10-30 and boot up a fresh machine connected and it might get the address x.x.x.27 how whack is that?
Connecting a spare drive to the usb port, and it managed to wipe all data on it larger than 2gb, goodbye dvd images. (even thou the internal discs are running ntfs)
Connecting a printer to the usb of the tank, and ad the printer as networkprinter to a windows vista ultimate = print halts when it’s supposed to finish the print and push it out of the printer (paper is printed with all the text) Printer has to be hardreset after that. (work fine over windows xp btw)
So…
Wlan = occasionally
ftp = lmao
http = not needed, sticking with my pcserver for this
gigabit switch = shows up as connected to a 1gbps network, but transfer speed capped at 12,5mb/sec
printer server = yeah, if you don’t have vista
extra storage attached to usb = yeah if you have an old fat drive, with no data of importance you dare connecting to it

All in all, I should return this piece of crap too, but seing as I got it from GB and live in DK, I don’t intend to go through the hassle just yet, guess I’ll give them one, maybe 2 months more for getting the software in order. Otherwise I’ll just sell it as a 1gb storage here on the used market, cuss really, thats the only thing this box is atm.