Promise Comments: Quieting Down the Promise SmartStor NS4300N and NS4300N Review!

[PromiseNasDude]

Am i correct that the new with Variable Fan Speed Control NAS is 4300N. While the one without is 4300 without the "N" in the end.

If they are both "4300N" Model, how could i tell which one is new version and which one is not. The place i live in all have blue box and no red as mentioned.
Does that mean they are all new?

Also wondering why the review only concentrate on Raid 5. How about non Raid pure read and write test?

Hello iwod, original we were going to change the model number but we agreed that it would give the impression that it was a "new" product therefore we decided to leave the name the same and delay the transition of the new packaging (currently used by NS2300N) until the Rev B model was ready.

For online purchasing, I will be working with our sales team on a way to clear old inventory before the new one hits. The new model also features improved LED (brighter green like NS2300N with the light actually wrapping around the lightpipe).

I will keep everyone updated. This just one of the small things that are still be worked out and that also delayed the release.

Here is a list of FW changes for NS4300N Rev A and Rev B plus NS2300N. NS4300N Rev A and Rev B FW will be SR5 while the NS2300N will hit SR1. Tim will cover NS2300N soon. =)

__________________________________________________________

Changes coming in SR1 FW for NS2300N and SR5 FW for NS4300N (this list is subject to change, meaning more features and or fixes, not less):

1. Remove join AD domain and NIS domain Feature (NS2300N ONLY)
2. Remove RAID1 migrate to RAID0 feature on NS2300N and remove RAID 5 /RAID 1 to RAID 0 Migration
3. Support 32 online clients to access NS2300N at the same time.
4. Add recycle bin feature (customer will be able to disable and enable)
5. Add DDNS feature (Dynamic DNS)
6. Supports read and write an USB drive with NTFS format.
7. Support port settings for SMTP (many ISP block port 25 so some may need to customize)
8. Disable the directory “PLUGINAPP” (directory will still exist but will be hidden)
9. Turn on the system led to red color when using locate feature with NAS.
10. Add a status bar in WebPASM when system is busy.
11. Support Bonjour Discovery and Printer Service (Such as AFP / iTunes /Printer Service / SMB / FTP)
12. Improve AFP performance. (The same as SMB protocol – Performance will increase 25 to 50 percent)
13. Add File System Check function to resolve file system errors.
14. Add AFP particular setting page for share folder permission. (Default setting is R/W)
15. Add AFP protocol particular setting page (user can customize welcome message)
16. Add a test button for email notification in WebPASM.
17. Add Hard Drive Spin-down and also turn off the HDD led when HDD is spin down (This applies to NS2300N for hard drive spin and turning off HDD led applies to both NS2300N and NS4300N.
18. Fix Special Characters with AD Domain
19. Ability to disable Guest Access on the Public Directory
20. Fan Control Optimizations (NS4300N Rev B ONLY)

_________________________________________________________________

Any other questions or concerns, please let me know.

Thanks.

 

[jimmyjam]

Hi Jam, sorry for the delay. Yes, you can. Use "Cut" instead of "Copy" to quickly move files from one directly to another. I do this often. Should work fine.

Thanks..

It works for a folder if its within the same shared folder. But I am trying to move all the files from one shared folder (Movies) to another shared folder (Media\Movies) on the NAS and it is taking about 5-6 minutes to move each file that are approximately 1.5 GB.
It would be nice to have some type of file management utility within the storage manager that would allow you to move files and Shared folders around.

 

[PromiseNasDude]

It works for a folder if its within the same shared folder. But I am trying to move all the files from one shared folder (Movies) to another shared folder (Media\Movies) on the NAS and it is taking about 5-6 minutes to move each file that are approximately 1.5 GB.
It would be nice to have some type of file management utility within the storage manager that would allow you to move files and Shared folders around.

Yes, this is true.. I will discuss with team and see what the possibilities are.. Give me some time and I will let you know one way or another.

Thanks..

 

[Tinga]

NS2300N problems

Hi, I just bought myself an NS2300N and first test was to ftp transfer 300Gb into the public share, it took 5 hours. Now I have loaded the DLNA plugin (latest firmware) and tried moving files into the video folder, it took over an hour to move (cut and paste) a 700Mb file into the video dir. Very slow. Also, the playstation3 can start playing the divx files but is stuttering its way through them, all are connected via a 100mb wired network.
Any ideas why it is very slow to do a move and or copy?
Any ideas why the playstation3 can't stream the divx very well at all?
FTP seems to be good with a max reported inflow of 190Mb/sec.

Cheers, Tinga

 

[VirtualEdge]

Impressed

I recently discovered this website and I'm finding it very informative - thanks Tim!

Billy - I must say, I am impressed by yoru response and active postings. It does appear that Promise is listening to its customers and it's critics. Not only are you listening, it appears that Promise is actually DOING something to improve its' products. Your active posts give me great hope.

I have been struggling to find a decent as close to business class NAS that I can find without shelling out tons of $$. the XBox steaming support is a sweet bonus, but I am more concern about the read/write performance. NFS support is a minimum with iSCSI being the covetted (sp?) jewel. I want to be able to run XenServer and ESX and use the NAS for the datastores/VM storage. Obviously iSCSI provides more flexibility and would like to know if it is even on the horizon for Promise for the 4300N?

I recently dumped (sold) my Dlink-323 becasue I got too tired of the slow performance and lack of NFS support. I visited our local Fry's and picked up the 4300N. I got home, turned it on and immediately packed it back up. it was way too loud. In my search, I found SNB!

When are the Rev B going to be available retail? Are they already released? This next gen... I take it that you were referring to something post Rev B. Do you have an ETA for it? Should I just suffer and wait?

Last question why is there such a speed/performance differnce between the 4300N and the 2300N; outside the # of drives supported? One more... any plan for having a unit attached as a DAS through eSATA and act as a NAS via gigabit ethernet at the same time? This seems so obvious and easy to do, yet I haven't seen anyone do this. They only seem to use the other ports for either printing or additional storage expansion. Okay, woud liek 2 eSATA ports - one for DAS and one for expansion.

Thanks Tim and Billy!

 

[thiggins]

Last question why is there such a speed/performance differnce between the 4300N and the 2300N; outside the # of drives supported?

The NS4300N uses a Freescale MPC8343 (no clock rate specified) and Promise PDC40719 SATA controller, while the NS2300N uses a Freescale MPC8313 @ 333MHz and Promise PDC20771 SATA controller . Both have 128 MB of RAM.

 

[PromiseNasDude]

I recently discovered this website and I'm finding it very informative - thanks Tim!

Billy - I must say, I am impressed by your response and active postings. It does appear that Promise is listening to its customers and it's critics. Not only are you listening, it appears that Promise is actually DOING something to improve its' products. Your active posts give me great hope.

I have been struggling to find a decent as close to business class NAS that I can find without shelling out tons of $$. the XBox steaming support is a sweet bonus, but I am more concern about the read/write performance. NFS support is a minimum with iSCSI being the covetted (sp?) jewel. I want to be able to run XenServer and ESX and use the NAS for the datastores/VM storage. Obviously iSCSI provides more flexibility and would like to know if it is even on the horizon for Promise for the 4300N?

I recently dumped (sold) my Dlink-323 becasue I got too tired of the slow performance and lack of NFS support. I visited our local Fry's and picked up the 4300N. I got home, turned it on and immediately packed it back up. it was way too loud. In my search, I found SNB!

When are the Rev B going to be available retail? Are they already released? This next gen... I take it that you were referring to something post Rev B. Do you have an ETA for it? Should I just suffer and wait?

Last question why is there such a speed/performance difference between the 4300N and the 2300N; outside the # of drives supported? One more... any plan for having a unit attached as a DAS through eSATA and act as a NAS via gigabit ethernet at the same time? This seems so obvious and easy to do, yet I haven't seen anyone do this. They only seem to use the other ports for either printing or additional storage expansion. Okay, woud liek 2 eSATA ports - one for DAS and one for expansion.

Thanks Tim and Billy!

Hi Virtual, glad to answer your questions.

Yes, we are coming with an iSCSI model. This will come after the successor to the NS4300N. It will be part of the Next-Gen family and will leverage our extensive knowledge from our iSCSI 2U and 3U Subsystems. I am do not have an ETA on this product yet but I will let you know once we have the roadmap finalized.

Rev B will become available end of October, early November. We are working the product into manufacturing now. The exchange will involving sending in the old unit for the new unit. I am still working on the exact process for the "special exchange", so stay tuned for more details. =) And no worries, you will be able to move the array/volume from Rev A to Rev B.

The Next Gen is slated for late Q1. How patient are you?

As for performance, the Freescale processors we used do not perform as well as we wanted thus we are making major change in Next Gen. The NS4300N uses a 400MHZ Freescale SoC while the N2300N uses a 333 MHZ (as Tim pointed out) Soc. This accounts for the difference in performance. Again, in the Next Gen, the 2 drive successor will also boast a lot more performance.

As for DAS and NAS Connectivity, I cannot say too much (as I do not want to give our plans away) but you are headed in the right direction. Stay Tuned.. =)

Need more, let me know.

Thanks.

 

[barrybishop2001]

Pch+ns4300

PromiseNasDude,
Im currently looking for a NAS system and the Promise has shown significant improvements with its firmware updates. Would you consider letting me test out the new NS4300 on my popcornhour? (Im in Fremont, just a stones throw away). I would be more then happy to post results on our forum http://www.networkmediatank.com for others to see its practicality, as I know there are many like me awaiting such a unit as yours.

 

[PromiseNasDude]

PromiseNasDude,
Im currently looking for a NAS system and the Promise has shown significant improvements with its firmware updates. Would you consider letting me test out the new NS4300 on my popcornhour? (Im in Fremont, just a stones throw away). I would be more then happy to post results on our forum http://www.networkmediatank.com for others to see its practicality, as I know there are many like me awaiting such a unit as yours.

Hi Barry, not really necessary as we currently Test the PCH in R&D, Test Lab and in my Lab.

I work very closely with Syabas on interop and we are getting together to work on some future stuff.

Our new DLNA Plug-In will add Mkv and m2ts support (coming soon). I am currently testing a beta version now exclusively with the PCH using 6GB to 8GB H.264 Mkv Encodes I created. Testing is done with Rev A and Rev B (no functionality differences between Rev A and Rev B).

If you still would like to come down I could arrange something.. Send me a PM..

Thanks.

 

[diggityDawg]

Hi Barry, not really necessary as we currently Test the PCH in R&D, Test Lab and in my Lab.

Hey PromiseNasDude,

Is there a way to set up an alias for the video share in the DLNA plugin? Could I possibly put a file out there that would point to other folders with video? Reason I ask is, before the DLNA plugin ever came out I put all my video in other shares on the NS4300N ("movies", "tv",etc) and now that My Movies and myTV are pointing to those folders, I couldn't move them just to get the DLNA plugin to work. But, I have a PCH and would love to be able to use the DLNA feature to connect to it and view the same video... I can connect to it now, but since there's nothing in the "video" folder, no video is shown.

Can you help with setting up an alias to the other folders on the NS4300N?

Thanks!

Eddie

 

[roustabout]

Wow, nice to see this thread

Hi Billy --

Thanks for turning up and taking questions!

Here's why I'm here tonight: I'm seriously considering moving off of the Promise and into a Thecus. When I first started in on this, I hadn't really gotten my head around how much of the cost was going to be in the harddrives (now available for half what I paid....)

In the last two weeks, my Smartstor has become very unreliable. I've needed to reboot it several times, and it takes a lot of patience before it reboots. I've waited > 1 hour for a reboot.

Since I have little things like my documents primarily resident on the box, this is killing me. I only reboot when the thing becomes unresponsive, but that's been happening a lot.

The biggest thing I can think of that I changed was at one point, I tried enabling snapshotting. My box became read-only for about a workday. I finally figured out what was up, disabled snapshotting again, but it took roughtly an hour for the change to "take."

Reading your comments I decided to take a spin to the website and check (if the box ever finishes its reboot) on the current release of various firmware elements.

I see something in the notes for the DLNA plugin about a "popcorn hour timeout" but can't locate the phrase in the knowledgebase.

Can you fill us in on that?

Also, if you guys could build an ssh client for this box? Oooooh, that'd be sweet. I spent some time trying to get a toolchain working on an ubuntu box and wound up bogged down on being able to get the toolchain the crypto tools it needed to even try to crosscompile. So I don't even know if the binaries I'd have built would work for this CPU or OS.

I'm regularly using rsync rather than drag and drop or your utility for my backups, as it preserves the folder creation dates. Also, if you could get NFS support up to the level where you're supporting modern NFS, that would be super helpful to those as need it. I'm not seeing my notes on this, but my memory is that when I tried NFS I was only able to get UDP NFS to work, which is not great for data integrity.

I'm still sitting here waiting on the reboot. Things is ugly, but I know exactly whose fault it is. I've rsynced files into the /data directory to run this as a syslog server for my home network by modifying the sysklogd system, for instance.

Bonus info for those of you who know some rsync:

there's a valid rsync user name of promise. The password is also promise. rsync is enabled when you tell the box that it's a target box for backing up a second Smartstor. Take a good look at the /data directory structure and files - its a read/writeable area of the system that is copied back over on reboot.

-R

 

[hacyaman]

Great thread

I'm glad to find this thread.

I really wanted spin down feature on my NS2300 and I found out it'll be supported in the next FW. I can't wait it. I was almost to sell NS2300 and purchase other NAS.

I want one more nice to have feature in iTunes plag-in. iPhone and iPodTouch can access iTunes server with pin-code. Is it possible to implement the feature on SmartStor iTunes plag-in? It would be great for home users.

 

[diggityDawg]

One other question:

Anyone know if it's possible to get SwissCenter installed on the NS4300N? Do any instructions exist? I did a search on their forums and NS4300N isn't mentioned in any posts...

 

[roustabout]

Followup: still v long to boot, but not locking up any longer

So, I issued a restart request about half an hour ago, and the system hasn't done anything with it yet.

I'm still able to read and write to the system, which is good.

I've gotten rid of the telnet plugin but have left my syslog writing full detail to one of my shares. This seems to be improving my life.

However, I'm seeing some really odd syslog kernel messages - hence the decision to try a restart:

Sep 13 05:32:56 terabox kernel: oom-killer: gfp_mask=0xd2
Sep 13 07:02:49 terabox kernel: DMA per-cpu:
Sep 13 08:33:33 terabox kernel: cpu 0 hot: low 16, high 48, batch 8
Sep 13 09:58:23 terabox kernel: cpu 0 cold: low 0, high 16, batch 8
Sep 13 11:27:35 terabox kernel: Normal per-cpu: empty
Sep 13 12:44:28 terabox kernel: HighMem per-cpu: empty

From what I can see in google, these point towards a memory leak, and right now, at least, the web interface is very unresponsive.

The firmware I'm using reports as
Version: 01.04.0000.11

The DLNA I'm using reports as
01.01.0000.01 from the ns4300_010411.upg file posted on the Promise site.

I'll delete it and see if that helps clear these incredibly long reboot times. I would like to be able to keep logging, as the logging facility provided by the system <cough>

-R

 

[PromiseNasDude]

Hey PromiseNasDude,

Is there a way to set up an alias for the video share in the DLNA plugin? Could I possibly put a file out there that would point to other folders with video? Reason I ask is, before the DLNA plugin ever came out I put all my video in other shares on the NS4300N ("movies", "tv",etc) and now that My Movies and myTV are pointing to those folders, I couldn't move them just to get the DLNA plugin to work. But, I have a PCH and would love to be able to use the DLNA feature to connect to it and view the same video... I can connect to it now, but since there's nothing in the "video" folder, no video is shown.

Can you help with setting up an alias to the other folders on the NS4300N?

Thanks!

Eddie

Hi Eddie, sorry for delay..

That is a tough one.. Shortcuts are not recognized by the scan engine as Sub Directories are.. I can see if it is possible to add this feature (no Promises as I need to check on UPnP and DLNA Guidelines) and let you know...

You have had the NAS since last spring - summer (2007)? We released the Plug-In in the Fall of last year.

 

[diggityDawg]

I can see if it is possible to add this feature (no Promises as I need to check on UPnP and DLNA Guidelines) and let you know...

That would be awesome, thanks!

You have had the NAS since last spring - summer (2007)? We released the Plug-In in the Fall of last year.

I don't remember when I got it right now... I know I downloaded and installed the DLNA plugin when it was first released, as I usually do all of the updates and plugins, and haven't been able to make much use of it due to this issue of having video in other shares on the NAS. I guess I'm not sure what your point is?

 

[PromiseNasDude]

That would be awesome, thanks!



I don't remember when I got it right now... I know I downloaded and installed the DLNA plugin when it was first released, as I usually do all of the updates and plugins, and haven't been able to make much use of it due to this issue of having video in other shares on the NAS. I guess I'm not sure what your point is?

Was just curious...

Will get back to you later..

Thanks..

 

[diggityDawg]

Was just curious...

Ok, no worries. One other thing I forgot to mention: if I can't set up an alias for video, can I just edit some config file so that the video share for DLNA is pointing to a different folder on the NAS? This wouldn't pick up all of my video, but at least I would have a large percentage of my movies covered...

Thanks again for your great support!

 

[PromiseNasDude]

Ok, no worries. One other thing I forgot to mention: if I can't set up an alias for video, can I just edit some config file so that the video share for DLNA is pointing to a different folder on the NAS? This wouldn't pick up all of my video, but at least I would have a large percentage of my movies covered...

Thanks again for your great support!

Hey Dawg, the Config is a part of the Plug-In and stored in the OS. Not user configurable file. After discussing with the team this week I will let you know what we can do.

 

[rbhalla]

Enabling Gigabit on Ns4300

Hi All,

I have the NS4300 but i cannot get it to work in gigabit mode. I have recently purchased a gigabit router and also a gigabit 5 port switch to which the NAS is connected. My computers are now working at 1.0gbps but the nas still shows as working at 100mbps. I went on to see the jumbo framse setting but i could not change anything on there.

Any ideas?