to gunrunnerjohn:
I just got it and I barely set it up. It runs Linux and it has SSH access, so if you are willing to edit the smb.conf file you can do pretty much anything that SAMBA is able to do. It is not rocket science.
It does have web interface to create users / groups and assign access privileges based on those to each share (shared directory) you create, but for home use I don't need any of that, so I can not give you any hands on info. (I always wonder when people write about troubles with the authorization on the DNS-321. Why don't they just leave it open? Who are they trying to protect the data in their home from?) BTW, it has support for Active Directory, so if you are a window server person and you run such thing at home, you can do that. (Again, I believe that is a SAMBA feature which is exposed via the web interface on the SS4200, so you might even get that working with the DNS-321 if you SSH into it and edit the samba config files. Assuming you need that level of user management.)
On my actual file server (which is yet another Linux machine) I keep important stuff (photo collection going back many years) read only, so it doesn't get deleted accidentally, but available to all. Backup areas are writable for all. To get data onto the r/o areas I have an upload area/share (writable for all) and then copy the data within the server while logged into the server. Doesn't take that much.
I got the SS4200 as a geek toy, put whatever drives I had around into it and just started playing around with it.
I am not happy with the power usage, but it supposed to be possible to send it to standby and use WOL to wake it when needed. This is a bit of a challenge to any OS, depending on drivers it can fail easily, so a tuned solution coming from EMC/Intel might do it more reliably than some home baked setup. (My current Linux server sure fails on that. I blame the NVidia driver.) I haven't tested this on the SS4200 yet, but according to what I read on the fan twiki, it works and someone had even wrote a windows util to do this easily / automatically. (When you boot your windows machine it sends a WOL to the server. When you shut down, it sends the server to sleep.)
FYI, the setup that Legendmicro sells via buy.com at $135 is actually (at least what I got) a SS4200EHW (bare hardware) branded by a large boxmaker, who sold it originally with WHS (that is Windows Home Server). Legendmicro got the leftover bare boxes w/o any HDDs, added a 256MB DOM module, onto which it copied the (downloadable from Intel) EMC software and put it in a plastic bag next to the machine. I.e. - like so many things related to Linux - it is more of a kit, rather than a product.... So don't buy this for your grandmother.
Assembly instruction are MIA, downloadable from Intel, and even with that, it is a pain to get the drives in.
The one thing I miss from the current SS4200 'firmware' (it is really just a DOM flash, not EEPROM, so the naming is questionable) is support for S.M.A.R.T. monitoring.
EMC supposedly has a newer version of the software, but since they bought IOMega it is questionable if other boxmakers will get the new version from EMC or it will be IOMega exclusive. And I doubt that Intel will spend money on buying new software for a two years old product. On the upside, Intel just released the newest 1.1.... version of software only a few months ago, so there is hope.
The box has two PWM controlled (4 wires) fans and it can report CPU / MB temp and voltages, so the fans can be (and it looks they are) intelligently controlled. But w/o SMART support it does not report HDD temperatures. That is bad. (I suspect the HW is SMART capable, it is just the EMC distro.) Also since the design is about two years old, it uses a relatively old, high temp, high power consumption CPU. Performance wise it is probably similar to an ATOM, but it sure drinks more power.
The thing is highly hackable (hence geek-toy). You could take out the PATA DOM and put in a HDD for booting (it has been done), or just boot from one of the SATA drives. Looking back, you could get similar hardware together yourself and still not be far from the $150. Maybe even below. Would the EMC distro run on that? Would standby work on that? I don't know.
Using it is less time (to setup/configure) than building your Linux file server from scratch, but still more than just plugging in a WHS based box. On the other side WHS boxes are more expensive and they offer no RAID5, so you lose 50% of disk space to mirroring instead of 25% to parity. The SS4200 is pretty much the cheapest RAID5 solution you can buy as a box. WHS uses what I call 'file system level mirroring', so you can mix and match various size disks.
I think the best use for the SS4200 to populate it with 4 identical drives right from the beginning and not plan later upgrades. If you put in 2 drives it will create a mirror. If later you add another 2, you can not extend your disk space and 'upgrade' to RAID5 w/o destroying all the data on the existing 2 drives.
A downside to the RAID5 is that if your machine (PSU, CPU, whatever) fails, you can not 'just plug the drives into another box'. It is quite more involved than that. I am not even 100% sure you can get back your data, although probably yes. But not easily. Since the SS4200 uses pretty standard parts, you can probably replace many of them - at least temporarily - until you get your data off, but if the motherboard fails... say goodbye to your stuff.
BTW, I think that might be true for your data on the WHS boxes too. What can you do with those drives when (and not if) the box itself fails? I don't know.
So - as usual - RAID solutions are nice to handle HDD failures, but for data safety, backup is king. But if you do maintain (preferably offsite) backups, then the SS4200 is the cheapest and easiest way to get a RAID5 server with 75% of the disk space you purchased actually available for data.
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Topic: RAID 1 rebuilds slowly (Read 10219 times)