Very Cheap NAS-WD TV HD Live 1
Sometimes you don’t need the best quality or performance from a device, you just need it to work good enough for a purpose. I wanted a cheap NAS for my home network that supported 2 USB connected storage devices. No high performance needed, just easy access to disks over the network. No RAID.
Usually that would mean going online and looking for a PogoPlug or some other cheap device. Then I realized that I already had the device I needed. Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player
Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player as a NAS
Network Attached Storage is NAS.
Most people buy a WD HD TV Live (or the newer Netflix enabled “plus” version) to playback media to an HDTV. It does that fairly well over HDMI at 1080p. Not bad for $50 (or $90 for the plus version). Because it runs Linux inside, it probably does other things well too. It is completely silent, so having this device connected to the bedroom TV is acceptable. Having it in your living room also works.
Windows7 Client
I connected an external USB 2.x HDD (300GB) into one of the USB ports on the WD and started browsing. From a Windows7 PC, the new storage was shown as an unprotected share. Files were accessed and I could drag and drop files over to the networked storage.
No special software needed to be loaded. It simply behaved as any other MS-Windows machine on the network with a disk shared.
Looking at the open ports on this NAS, only ports for storage were opened – 139 and 445.
I added the WD USB storage to Win7 Media Center as a library. It worked perfectly, as expected. That means media located on either the Win7 PC or this WD-USB HDD are completely network accessible. That is the point of a NAS, right?
Ubuntu Client
In the Linux world, running my Lubuntu distro, I used it as a CIFS share. I tried to mount it with this command:
sudo mkdir /mg
sudo mount -t cifs -o uid=joe-user,file_mode=0644,dirmode=0755 //mg/folder /mgIt worked perfectly. I can cd /mg and access all the files as “joe-user” running scripts or whatever I need on them. It was fast as any other NFS storage that I’ve used over a similar connection. Very acceptable.
The WD has 2 USB ports, so I connected another HDD to the other and mounted it. Perfect, it works.
I’ve only tried this with a USB HDD formated by Windows. I doubt ext2, ext3, ext4, JFS or XFS formating would work, since this is a CIFS share. The NFS socket is not listening.
Performance
The WD is 100-base-t connected, so it isn’t really a file server, but 100Mbps isn’t so bad either. Just for fun, while I was playing back some video using the WD from a different network storage area, I forced the USB attached disk to be very busy. The playback wasn’t impacted at all. I have copied files to and from the NAS and it is definitely limited by the 100BT connection. All my other systems use GigE (1000-base-tx) and all my switches are GigE too. Seeing 9MB/s transfers is a little painful when you’re used to seeing 65MB/s, but still, 9MB/s over a 100base-t connection is really quite excellent.
I may connect a 2TB USB disk to this little machine and use it for network backups. Talk about a very cheap NAS that does more. The WD TV Live HD … or whatever they officially call it … names like this drive me nuts … works and it works well for simple networked storage. You can find them new or refurbished for $50, just make certain the word Live is in the title. That is what Western Digital uses to say networked. You can connect any USB storage into this device, it isn’t limited to WD brand disks. You know, I’m a little scared by how well this actually works. I just wish it had a GigE network connection so that backing up multiple GB virtual machine images didn’t take so long.
If you’d like to know more about this little device, check out a few other related articles here .
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and good part is — you can switch it off to save HDD wear & tear! :)