Hardware Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B Network Storage

I've had one of these for around a year, paired it up with two 500GB Seagate HD's and haven't had a problem since. It just sits in my computer room upstairs with all my music, movies etc. on it. Twonky Media is a great inclusion (even if it's just a 30 day trial, just means restarting the NAS every 30 days), it means my Kiss 1600 Media Streamer connected to my TV downstars pulls everything straight off my Icy-Box NAS so I don't have to leave my PC on.

The only slight issue I have is the network performance, copying files to and from can take some time. This seems to apply to all NAS's of this price though, cost has to be cut somehere, and the poor 300Mhz CPU can't keep up.

All in all, it's an increadibly stable piece of kit. It's never crashed etc. on me in the time I've had it. It's also great to see a member of the Icy-Box team here on Bit-tech ectively ancouraging trying to mod it. A linux install would be nice, but too much hassle imo, when the default firmware works so well.

 

My experience with these boxes is poor. The old model wasn't compatible with all hard drives (like the £250 worth of drives I had just bought) and they had to revise the board. They did say it could be upgraded, but the cost was almost as much as the Icybox in the first place. The RAID was also very un-RAID like one day when one hard drive failed, the "mirrored" drive failed as well. Lost everything.
I've gone down the Dlink route after reading good reviews and few reported problems. It's also much quicker on the LAN - the Icybox is really poor in this respect. Oh, yea, the printer server thing never did work either.

 

Hi UltraKev

If you had the earlier model which had the old chipset the upgrade to the later version is free, where did you contact for this support & receive information about an upgrade cost?

I'm pretty sure that your configuration was wrong as the mirrored RAID configuration failed and also the print server did not work, had you run a firmware update on the device?

 

Anyone ever cracked the "SMB randomly stopping" problem? I bought it as a NAS for windows boxes at home, so if SMB stops, and it does, frequently, then it's useless. Getting money back from scan is more painful than dental work so i'd like to try and fix it. I've tried a few of the things on the forums out there but there's nothing definitive and nothing has worked so far. So - anyone here have this problem or knows how to fix it?