Comment thread for Mediasonic Dual Bay RAID + NAS Review

[SKYMTL]

AkG has posted another great review of a NAS solution and this time he is looking at the Mediasonic SU2LA Dual Bay RAID + NAS. This thing seems to be widely available at etailers all across the country and other than a few instruction SNAFUs, it seems to be a pretty good low-cost NAS solution.

You can check out the review here:

Mediasonic SU2LA Dual Bay RAID + NAS Review

Please use this thread for any questions, comments or suggestions you may have.

[PBX]

Hi,

Could you describe how you managed to map the drive, I cant find a drive path after installing the software.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers

[AkG]

Its been a loooong while since I played with this unit but I remember saying in the review exactly what you got to do to find the lil SOB so you can map it (its under the Software Installation page IF I Remember Correctly). The biggest thing is the computer you run Sdisk.jar on has to been on the same subnetwork (for example 255.255.255.xxx for the NAS and the computer). If I'm wrong just let me know and I'll see what I can dig up for you (just beware I no longer have this unit in my possession and it's all by memory and notes at this point!).

[PBX]

Hi,

In the review section you talked about all the steps up until mapping the new drive (instaed of setting up a new windows log on). I have run Sdisk and have configured the drive however I cant find drive to map although I can open the set up page through run - 192.168.2.5/.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[AkG]

So manually mapping to \\192.168.2.5\xxxxx (xxx being the folder on the drive where nas actually places files, usually smb accnt name or "public") doesn't work?

[PBX]

Yep,

That did it, thanks very much for all your help.

Cheers

[AkG]

Glad I could help PBX.

[richmc]

Sorry for jumping in but you guys seem to be the only thread talking about this drive.

I bought one at New Year and it's taken me till now to get it partly working.

I've got a pair of seagate 750Gb barracudas but they have slightly different firmware. I can put either one in the drive case and it's detected, formated and I can access it. If I put both in at the same time, neither is detected, in any mode. Even in single mode I should still be able to see both and access them as independant drives.

Does anyone know of a firmware update for the SU2LA?

Thanks

Richard

[googooly]

The review is awesome. However due to some issue I may get another External Enclosures . can anyone recommend a good dual bay ex. HDD like this one ?

[JKC]

My observations of the Mediasonic HUR1-SU2LA.

It has uPnP capabilities. It shows up in My Network Places as "STORAGE". Double clicking the icon brings up the login page in your current browser. uPnP must be enabled in "My Network Places"

One cannot map to more than 1 user folder from the same Windows XP computer. If I have 2 separate Windows PCs, then I can map a drive to Alice's folder on one PC and Bob's folder on another PC. This is not a usual server behaviour. This restriction is mentioned in the CD manual, so apparently the notion of copying from a user directory to another user directory is foreign to them (as long as each one logs in with the right password.)

The users' top-level folders are not visible in the network, under "Entire Network". This is again not normal to have the user's folders in "stealth" mode, because one needs to know the name of the folder to map to. This is bound to confuse the user. Maybe from a security point of view it is better to hide the folders, e.g. for business use. The cover of the box mentions it is useful as a workplace server.
Note that after mapping a drive, "My Network Places" remembers the folders that were mapped, so that mitigates this problem a bit.

[JKC]

I find the ventilation holes are quite tiny, even though they look like slits on the outside, these slits are blocked on the inside of the case to leave only a small pair of holes, about 1 mm in diameter. This leads to very low airflow which is not a very good design for a device that calls itself a "server". There is a very noticeable difference in the fan speed when the case is opened.

I have a pair of Hitachi HDT72110SLA360 1TB drives and they get quite warm to the touch. I think it is more than 45C when they are running.

There is no spin-down or sleep mode while idle. I have another NAS that has a timeout after no activity, it will put the drive in a lower power mode and this reduces the temperature of the hard drive to what feels like room temperature.