Review: Vantec NexStar LX Ultra NAS (Network Attached Storage)

My home ‘server’ has been playing up and dropping off the network a bit lately, so I thought it was time for a change. I didn’t want a real server, taking up lots of room and using plenty of power, and so the old ‘server’ was SME Server running inside a virtual machine on my ‘do everything’ Eee box.

After looking around on the net and the reviews out there it seemed that the big brand names were quiet expensive and have a few compatibility problems. Umart had the NexStar LX Ultra (also called the 475LX) quite cheap and so I bought one and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive to go in it.

The features of the NAS are quiet impressive:

The manual showed how to put the drive inside (requires a screwdriver, so not as streamlined as the more expensive boxes) and that was pretty much it. The user interface is very basic, but does the job. Some guides would have been good, so this might help someone:

  1. Change the admin password before doing anything.
  2. The hard drive needs to be formatted first, before any shares can be set up. Go into ‘Disk Utility’ (on the left) and click the “Format” button (yep, the little one way over on the right hand side).
  3. In the Status page decide what services you want to have. SMB & FTP can each be turned on or off, and the host name and workgroup name should be set.
  4. Also on the Status page is a button for the time setting. If your firewall lets the NAS talk to the world it can set the time automatically with SNTP. The default server is clock.isc.org, but I’m using oceania.pool.ntp.org to spread the load. I’d suggest using an NTP pool near you.
  5. Setting up SMB shares is odd. The first thing to do is to create a user. Do that. Users can have read/write privileges, or just read only. Once the user is created, select that user and click on the Modify button. The sharing list has two panels. On the left are the available shares and on the right are the ones that the user has access to. The PUBLIC share is a default, but the Create button lets you make more. Once the share is created it can be added to the user with the arrow buttons. When the shares are set up, click the ‘Back’ button.
  6. FTP access is basically the same deal. Create a user or two, and then assign permissions for the various shares. The shares are common between SMB and FTP so you only have to set them up once.
  7. If you are going to use BitTorrent, you need to define where the files will go, and optionally set up the email notification for when jobs are complete.
  8. The media server can share three types of directories: photos, video and music. You can have the same share for each, or separate out your files.

Performance is pretty good. I’ve got it plugged into my router (which has a 4 port switch) but I connect wirelessly using an Access Point plugged into the router. Transfers of 15+GB when doing backups work quite well and don’t drop out. There is a programmable spin-down interval to stop the hard drive, and while the drive is spinning up there can be a delay of 5-10s before the shares respond. It works with my Beyonwiz DP-S1 PVR as a source of streaming AVIs and MP3s. This makes watching Vodcasts and Podcasts quite convenient.

Final conclusion is that it is a cheap, fairly quiet, not-ugly box that simply does what it needs to. No hot-swap, no RAID, no fuss.

Posted on February 3, 2010 at 17:27 by Administrator · Permalink
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