Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

I recently came across a WD My Book "Blue Rings" model, and I have been impressed by how bad the stock setup is. Very bad, as in "won't do what it's supposed to, let alone anything really interesting" bad. "We don't know how to properly handle caps vs lowercase" bad. You get the picture.

There isn't too much out there on these beyond "how do I de-brick it" and "usermode software to put on it", but it's definitely not overpowered (32MB RAM). So far all I've found is a Debian Lenny install ready to go, and I'm not sure that this little box is worth putting a lot of effort into. Anyone come across any other replacement software for the original MyBook that's good, or is it firmly in the "toss" category?

I have worked with these things quite a bit in the past, and I think we had one of this particular model that died. If I'm not mistaken, this is basically a small NAS type MyBook (rather than the simple USB external drives). The biggest problem with these devices is that the hardware is not so good. After awhile, they just die. I've seen quite a number of MyBook devices die mysterious deaths, never because their internal hard drives went bad, but always due to other hardware failures. The second major issue with this type of device is that the actual capabilities of the hardware are very low. If I remember correctly, the NAS models had only 32 MB of RAM. They definitely can't handle two or more connections with any competence (and will fail the transfers quite readily when they are not up to the task).

In one ridiculous episode, we had about two dozen Oracle databases that were sending their nightly backups to this puny little thing, and the cron jobs had to be staggered very carefully to avoid two machines connecting at the same time. If there was significant overlap, the transfers would fail. The poor person who had to maintain this ridiculous system (but who of course did not set it up!) was myself. There are too many stories I could tell about having to deal with these things, and how unsuitable they are for even the smallest business..... At some point you will probably end up prying open the case and attempting to retrieve the hard drive after the other hardware fails. The end game was that I finally got sick of just waiting for these things to die. I put two 500 GB drives in an old IBM PC, installed Linux with software RAID-1, and called it a day. Since that time, the little IBM PC has saved us at other times when other storage schemes failed. It can handle any number of connections I give it without breaking a sweat.

We currently have a similar WD 2TB NAS device that is now collecting dust because I don't trust it with anything. Actually, we have a number of large drives just sitting around just because they were pulled from dead MyBook devices. But I digress... The best thing about these little boxes is that they can be opened up, and their hard drives can be removed. You may have to use a screwdriver, and bend some metal in the process use your strength (depending on the model), but it's possible. For your own sanity and wellbeing, I would highly recommend putting the hard drive in another machine, and using it in that capacity. You will thank yourself later.

I had kind of started to figure that, but I thought I'd at least check. I got it because it wouldn't work for a group that it was given to (backing up one machine). I used the SSH hack thinking that that would make it easier to deal with. It worked once, then once the My Book World was turned off it stopped accepting connections.

WD makes a decent fixed drive (as long as you don't want FC/SAS/SCSI), but I haven't been too taken with their NASes. The ShareSpace is OK, but this one just doesn't work. Makes the Iomegas look better.