Simpleshare network drive almost a cross-platform panacea

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Device: Simpleshare STI-NAS/160
Company: SimpleTech Inc.
Web: www.simpletech.com
Price: $238.95 USD
Compatibility: any OS with SMB networking (CIFS/SAMBA) or NFS

Requirements: home or corporate lan with 10/100 ethernet, a brain.

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SIX OR FIVE YEARS AGO getting a "Network Attached Storage" (NAS) device, that is, a hard drive appliance that you just plug on a network and can be accessed from any machine in your home or office LAN was expensive, very expensive. The first generation devices like Intel's "inBusiness Storage Station" were introduced with a $999 price tag, and those were in fact full PCs in a custom enclosure the size of a small shoe box, just lacking a video card inside. In the case of Intel's NAS, it had a Pentium I MMX cpu and a pair of mirrored 5,400rpm IDE hard drives running FreeBSD. I managed to purchase one of those about three years ago from a closeout store for one fifth of the original price, and I can say that it was one of the best investments I've made.

Introduction, and why standards matter

Sadly for early adopters like myself and luckily for you, these days there are "network attached storage" devices which can be bought for much less money. So when the 30GB FreeBSD powered box started showing the dreaded "disk full" messages, it was time for me to start looking for alternatives. The first units that caught my attention were Ximeta's "Netdisk" products, which are currently selling for as low as $135 greenbacks for a 80 GB model. But I quickly realized that such a low price came with a catch: Ximeta's proprietary and patented "NDAS" technology means its hard drives require special drivers on each machine in your LAN in order to work, so forget about accessing your shared drive from that black sheep machine in your LAN that is running Solaris x86, Netware, OS/2, BeOS or any-other-new-or-ancient-OS not blessed by Ximeta. That is, unless you're comfortable with getting forever-beta drivers for linux (that only work on certain kernel versions), and Mac OS-X as the only supported non-windows OSs. When INQuired about this important issue, a company representative told me "The reason that we do use are own protocol is that our Netdisk does not have a OS or processor that NAS devices have". Oh well...

It was clear for me then that I wanted something standards based. Something based on SMB networking (also known as CIFS on windows or Samba in linux, or NETBEUI in OS/2) would suffice and here's where Broadcom came to the rescue. Last year the company introduced its "NAS on a chip" ("NASOC") solution, a chipset with a 300 Mhz MIPS core that implements both standards based SMB networking (CIFS/SAMBA) and NFS (Network File System) on a chip, thus getting instant compatibility with about every operating system on earth, from obscure/ancient Unix like SCO or AIX to every flavour of linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS-X, Netware, Solaris 10 x86, OS/2, you-name-it.

And among the first companies to release NASOC based storage devices was SimpleTech. So here's my complete review of the affordable and compatible Simpleshare (160GB version), one which has been three months in the making.

The Simpleshare unit and the included "folded poster" setup guide

Beauty, expansion and compatibility

First let's talk about the looks: the unit looks very nice due to its small design (even smaller and thinner than an external cd-rom/cd-rw/dvd-rw enclosure box), its nice aluminium enclosure, its quiet fan-free operation, the ability to place it both vertically using a pair of plastic stands, or horizontally. Expandability is assured due to the unit's pair of USB 2.0 connectors in the back. But more on that below.

Connectors in the back of the Simpleshare

Inside the beast

If you're not a computer geek, feel free to scroll down to the next section. As a computer geek, I call a hardware review done, specially if it's this interesting, without opening it up and taking a look at the guts of the device. In the case of SimpleTech's device, what I saw was beauty and simplicity... there's the IDE hard drive (for the record a Hitachi Deskstar model HDS722516 marked as 7,200 rpm and with size as 164.7GB, made in Thailand in Dec '04 on my unit), the IDE cable, and on the circuit board, a very nice user replaceable clock-type battery -so the unit can keep time and date even when unplugged-, some DRAM, an ALI M5273 USB 2.0 controller chip (which manages the usb ports in the back), an Acard ATP865 IDE controller chip, an AMD AM29lv64 flash memory and finally the main brain of the unit: the Broadcom 4780 "NAS on a chip" square and surface mounted piece of silicon, the size of your big toe's nail. No chips need cooling or heatsinks. Strangely, while I expected to see a heatsink or connection between the hard drive and the aluminium case, yet there is none. There's a tin-based RF-shield, and that's it, there's just "air" between the hard drive and the case exterior.

a full file server PC with SMB and NFS reduced to a single surface mounted chip, look ma, no CPU or heatsink!. Kudos to Broadcom for their cross-platform, open-standards stance and approach.

One thing which worried me initially was the total lack of cooling for the hard drive, specially considering the one included is a 7,200 rpm one which tend to get very hot. Idea for SimpleTech: why not replace the HDs with Samsung ones like the quiet 5,400 rpm SV1604N, which are not only much quieter and cooler at 5400 rpm, but apparently still being manufactured?. The Simpleshare gets noticeably hot to the touch, undoubtedly thanks to the 7,200 rpm drive -which is overkill since the biggest bottleneck is the 100mbit fast ethernet link- and the lack of fans. Affixing a mercury thermometer for 3 minutes to the aluminium case while a 10 GB file copy was being conducted measured 39.1 degrees -room temperature was at around 25 degrees Celsius-. [Note to our american readers, that's 102.38 and 77 fahrenheit, respectively]. After three months of daily use, the hard drive has not died, so I guess it's operating within the manufacturer's specifications.

One thing to note for the geeks is that there's not much information about the internal file system used by the unit. SimpleTech doesn't give much details about it and I surely looked around for clues. The distinction between "foreign" NTFS and FAT/FAT32 drives made by the documentation and user interface and the "native" (non-foreign) volumes formatted by the unit leads me to believe that it's some proprietary FS implemented by the Broadcom chipset. But this is speculation on my part. Yes I could have gone an extra step and removed the drive and attempted to read it on a PC, but too late, this review was about complete and the drive is now holding 90GB of my precious data. If you have any comments on this point, drop me an email and I'll have the information added as a footnote.

Testing

I divided testing in two parts: compatibility and benchmarking. The Simpleshare exceeds at compatibility on the hardware level, with its "SMB and NFS on a chip" provided by its built-in chipset from Broadcom. On the software level, well, things could have been a little better. The "NASFinder" web-based application included in the CD, however, is coded using ActiveX and thus works only on MSIE, which in turn restricts you to Windows (remember when MSIE 4 used to be available for competing OSs like Solaris? that only lasted until MSFT got the DOJ off his back. Coincidence?). Leaving that aside, the unit can be accessed with ANY web browser (I used a mix of Netscape 7.2 on windows, Firefox in Sun's Java Desktop linux, and Mozilla 1.7.8 in OS/2 to setup and edit its configuration from different machines just by pointing the browsers to the unit's IP address and entering the "simple/share" default username/password. The "NASFinder" application issue however will probably only affect newbies. Anyone which uses Linux or OS/2 or Unix probably doesn't need a "wizard" of sorts, but things don't have to be that way. The reality, however, is that I was able to connect and copy/read files effortlessly to the Simpleshare unit from Windows XP SP2, Sun's Java Desktop System linux (using Samba and the Gnome graphical interface to browse shared drives), and IBM OS/2 (over NFS). So it excelled in the cross-platform test.

SimpleShare disk mounted via NFS from my OS/2 box. Hooray for open standards!

To test its performance, a first basic test was to rip a DVD to the local hard disk from the top-of-the-line Gateway 7422 Athlon64 notebook, then mount the SimpleShare drive over Windows Networking (CIFS) and move the 4.35GB of data comprising the DVD to the NAS drive. To reduce bottlenecks, the Simpleshare unit was plugged into the same 10/100 Linksys switch as the notebook. Sending data to the unit (writing to the drive) took 1032 seconds, which according to my poor math means a 4.21 MB/s performance. Remember this was using the WinXP graphical shell and dragging and dropping a folder from one drive to another, so there's some minor overhead there. Copying back the 4350MB of of data from the Simpleshare drive to the notebook took a mere 871 seconds, which means 4.99 MB/s.

For a more scientific test, I decided to run Passmark Performance Test 5.0 on a shared Simpleshare volume, and repeat the test with my trusty (but five years old) NAS dinosaur: the Intel inBusiness Storage Station which is a PI running FreeBSD unix. The results of the tests can be seen below and were very surprising: the 30GB Intel box got 3.2MB/sec in reads and 2.1MB/sec in writes, and the Simpleshare scored 5.1 in "sequential reads" and 3.0 MB/sec in average sequential writes. I can't explain why the Passmark write score is so much lower than the plain file copy using the WinXP interface. I guess it has to do with the nature of the R/W calls (the Passmark software does cached win32, uncached win32, and raw writes).

Running some tests... drag-and-drop copying of data was somehow faster than these results

In short: the unit is very fast for storage of documents, data, music, and even DVD content played over a LAN. I was expecting it to have more or less the same performance as my trusty old intel box, but clearly the Broadcom "NAS on a Chip" has an edge over the ancient Intel Storage Station and its FreeBSD and Samba 2.x - not to mention the difference in the HDs used on each (the Intel's are ATA33).

On the reliability side, after three months of daily use -which even included leaving a P2P client running, selecting "president speech" as the search string and then leaving the P2P client running over the shared Simpleshare drive -downloading and sharing the speeches 24/7 until today- , the hard drive has not died, so I guess the drive is operating within the manufacturer's specifications. Running P2P applications to a drive is the ultimate survival test, it's a seek intensive process.

I would have appreciated the addition of an optional fan which can be toggled on/off with a switch or even better, the replacement of the drive with a cooler 5400 rpm one. But who am I to say... probably this was a marketing decision, and you and me know that marketing gurus are moved by numbers "the higher the number, the better" with little regard for the implications. Notice how almost all HD makers have moved to 7200 rpm without recognizing the need for quieter, cooler 5400 drives?.

A pair of external USB 2.0 hard disks plugged into the unit (using a different chipset each)

Finally, expandability is great: you can plug up to two external hard disks to the unit's USB 2.0 ports, and such drives will be shared on your lan. Or, you can also plug a printer into one of such USB ports and the Simpleshare will act as a SMB (Samba/Windows Networking) print server on the LAN. When a USB external hard drive formatted with FAT/FAT32 or NTFS is connected to SimpleShare, the disk is immediately recognized and shared on the network. The share name is set by SimpleShare, based on the file system used on the disk. Existing files are not be deleted or modified in any way by SimpleShare. If the disk is later removed from the SimpleShare and attached to another computer, it will still be readable.

The shares created by SimpleShare for legacy disks are referred to as "Foreign Shares". SimpleShare's legacy disk support function makes it easy to attach a USB disk formatted with FAT or NTFS and share its files with other users on the network, with the following restrictions: 1) Disks formatted with NTFS are read-only. 2) Only share level access controls are provided for foreign shares. User base security, domain member and domain controller security controls are not provided for foreign shares. 3) "Legacy" (fat32/ntfs) disks cannot be used for of mirroring. 4) Legacy disks cannot be used for striping.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

The Good:

• Attractive design, metal enclosure
• Plug-and-forget, no messy OS to deal with
• Standards-based SMB and NFS networking makes it compatible with almost everything, from obscure unix flavours to OS/2 to Mac OS-X to you-name-it.
• Affordable.
• Multi-voltage, auto switching power brick.
• Allows plugging of USB 2.0 external hard disk enclosures to the unit's two USB ports for expansion.
• Acts as a SAMBA (SMB) print server if you plug a USB printer to it!
• Real Time Clock that keeps time during power off. The device can auto-sync with an "Internet Time Server" during boot-up.
• Keeps check of the hard drive health via SMART.
• Idiot-proof setup! (if you know anything about networking)
• Idiot-proof setup using Microsoft IE on windows (if you don't know anything about networking).
• Three-years factory warranty (if your purchase the 250GB model).
• Can act as a DHCP server OR client. In other words it can obtain its own IP address, or provide one to every other PC or device in your LAN.
• Supports both "Windows Domain" style networking or "peer to peer" (aka "Workgroup") style SMB file sharing.
• The unit is able to send e-mail notifications to the "administrator" (you).
• A full manual in PDF format is available.
• Power management aware. You can set the time-out period using the web interface. After that given inactivity time, the unit's internal hard drive is powered off. This not only saves time but it's likely it extends the life of the drive as well.
• Easy "folded poster" setup guide covers WinXP and Mac OS-X.
• Web based interface that works for almost everything (the discovery agent is brain-damaged, however, see below).
• Firmware can be easily updated by selecting and uploading a file from the web admin. interface.

The bad

• No permanent power switch. Once plugged in, the unit is initially off, but as soon as you power it up, it's a "soft switch", so there's no way to turn it off completely, there's always power going into the unit. The documentation describes it lovely: "Once turned on, the only way to completely turn it off is to remove the power plug". Sheesh!.
• USB disks with data on them (not formatted by the unit) are showed as "Foreign disks".
• Mirroring and stripping is possible, but is not explained well on the documentation or web admin. interface.
• External USB hard drives plugged to the unit which are formatted with NTFS are mounted as read-only. This is probably a licensing issue (the Vole probably wants several hundred thousand greenbacks for their "intellectual property" licence, specially since this is a cross-platform device that doesn't tie people to Windows as Microsoft likes). I can't really say I blame SimpleTech or Broadcom for this!. So, if you have some external USB 2.0 hard drives that you like to plug to the Simpleshare for additional storage capacity, simple format those disks as FAT32 if you want RW access. It can be done, even if Microsoft placed artificial limitations to the Win2k and WinXP partitioning and format. Just format your USB drive from a Win9x/ME computer or use a tool like Partition Magic. Such large drives, once created, will then be fully readable and writeable, even from Win2k and XP. Isn't the great Microsoft Monopoly interesting?.
• External drives plugged into the usb ports apparently cannot be made "spin down" at will.
• Only share level access controls are provided for "foreign shares" (fat32/ntfs usb disks plugged to the unit). User based security, domain member and domain controller security controls are not provided for such "foreign shares".
• 10/100 Ethernet. No gigabit version. I'd have killed for a gigabit version of this drive!. Two of the systems on my lan already run gigabit over copper ethernet, and are connected to a below-$200 workgroup gigabit switch.
• Easy "folded poster" setup guide doesn't cover basic linux drive mounting using Samba command line commands or the Gnome/KDE graphical user interfaces. Shame on SimpleTech!.
• The 160GB version only carries a one year factory warranty, unlike the 250GB model.

The Ugly

• The HTML manual received on CD with the unit was readable with Microsoft IE, but Netscape 7.2, Mozilla and Firefox choked on the html links!. Apparently it's possible to create "file:///" links in such a format (I'm sure the slash format has something to do with it) that works in MSIE, but breaks any Mozilla based browser. And SimpleTech managed to do it!. Hint for the next time: test your html docs with alternative browsers!!.
• THE SCREENSHOTS used to create the PDF were of too low resolution. When you attempt to zoom on the provided screenshots, you get blurred text that sometimes can't even be read. Obviously they wanted to keep the size of the PDF down. But since the pdf is burned on a cd, what's the point?
• SIMPLETECHSPEAK: a new english dialect created by the SimpleTech marketing and documentation teams, that consists of replacing common computing terms with strange, weird, totally unrelated ones. What you and me would refer to as an "external hard drive" (external to the SimpleTech unit, as opposed to the internal hard drive inside the Simpleshare) is called a "foreign disk" in Simpletechspeak. Why not call them "USB DISK" for the planet's sake?. The familiar concept of "mounting" disks is also unknown in Simpletechspeak (probably some bible belt nut objected to it?). They created a new word and concept: "claiming" a disk. In the words of the documentation, before a disk can be made available to network users "it has to be claimed by Simpleshare". (sheesh!)
• ACTIVEX based "NASFINDER" is a menace. According to the unit's docs: "SimpleTech's NASfinder wizard provides automatic network drive mapping and configuration for easy setup and quick plug-and-play installation". That is correct... IN WINDOWS. It would have taken SimpleTech and/or Broadcom a very simple JAVA APPLET to create a fully crossplatform unit-finder, which would identify the unit on the LAN, assign it an IP address, and then display SIMPLE INSTRUCTIONS in a sentence or two about mounting the shares on linux, os/2, macOS-X or unix using samba or NFS's "mount" command (native mounting could even have been achieved from a signed java applet, using the Java JNI native code interface).

NASFinder works great... on MSIE/Windows. Forget it if you use any other browser on a non-windows OS!. :(

The Verdict

I give the Simpleshare-160 from SimpleTech four fernandos in my one-to-five personal rating scale. Initial start-up is very easy and the standards-based design (SMB and NFS) is something that both SimpleTech and Broadcom should be applauded for (unlike Ximeta's proprietary drivers). If all you want is to plug your drive on the lan and start moving content to it, this is for you. No ugly drivers to install or proprietary network protocols. 100% compatible with almost every OS on Earth that has some form of SMB networking or NFS available.

I can only hope that they ditch the activeX based "NASFINDER" or at least offer a Java based configuration utility for the rest of us who run some form or another of a non-Windows OS. The technology is there, they only have to hire a MSFT-free tech head to write the code. But like I said above, most power users can certainly live without the "wizard". This unit will be used @ the INQ's South America labs for work storage, so you'll be the first to know when/if we experience any problems. µ