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My Book World: Linux NAS done well (almost...)

Submitted by dvhart on Sun, 2008-07-06 05:18.

wdfMyBook_World_1N.jpg I picked up a 1 TB Western Digital My Book World from Fry's today - that's a 1 Terabyte Gigabit Network Attached Storage box - for $220. I've seen a few consumer technical appliances that run Linux under the covers, and haven't been terribly impressed with many of them. So far however, this box is slick. While WD doesn't support Linux officially (bad WD!) it is pretty trivial to get the box into a techie-friendly state.

With only an hour or so of tinkering, I was able to enable ssh, disable the java server, add my own users, and mount my partitions via sshfs. The info on doing this is already covered by "Paul" at his How to setup My Book World Edition II page so I won't duplicate that here. Should also probably link to Martin Hinner's My Book Howto directly as he appears to have done the hard work. I'll spend the next few days figuring out how to best make use of this device; most likely looking into something like rdiff-backup.

Something they don't mention are the specs of this little beauty, for those of you who might care, read on...

[root@MyBookWorld ~]# uname -a
Linux MyBookWorld 2.6.17.14 #1 PREEMPT Fri Jan 18 10:40:25 GMT 2008 armv5tejl GNU/Linux

[dvhart@MyBookWorld ~]$ head -n2 /proc/cpuinfo 
Processor       : ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) rev 5 (v5l)
BogoMIPS        : 99.73

[dvhart@MyBookWorld ~]$ head -n2 /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:        30032 kB
MemFree:          4496 kB

[dvhart@MyBookWorld ~]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs                2.8G  179M  2.5G   7% /
/dev/root             2.8G  179M  2.5G   7% /
/dev/md3              950M  151M  751M  17% /var
/dev/md4              914G  200M  913G   1% /shares/internal

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Didn't make the cut

Submitted by dvhart on Wed, 2008-07-09 18:22.

Well, between the dreadful throughput and the fact that the system partitions started getting the same journal failures and remounting themselves read-only, I decided I couldn't use this device as a backup system. It's too bad, I think the device had a lot of potential, but WD just cut too many corners on this one. I returned it to Frye's yesterday and will look to "dumb" drives as my backup solution.

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Slow Data Rates

Submitted by dvhart on Mon, 2008-07-07 23:23.

Well, as it turns, besides borking the filesystems, WD also let their marketing guys have a say in the hardware configuration for packaging purposes. The box has "gigabit ethernet" printed all over it, implying gigabit data rates. Well, according to forum post the device barely exceeds 10Mb of throughput due to its lightweight embedded ARM processor:

Dear 1,

Thank you for contacting Western Digital Customer Service and Support.

Our internal testing shows that the MyBook World's will transfer at 
24-40Mbps (3-5 MBps) on a local network. The drive does not move data
quicker because that is the maximum throughput that the enclosure's
CPU can handle.

Sincerely,
Anthony M.

Western Digital Service and Support
http://support.wdc.com

In my tests of single large files (2GB) over CIFS I only see about 2.5 MB/s (20 Mbps). This is a hardware limitation I cannot overcome, and may force me to return the drive. I'll do some practical usage tests and see how badly this impacts my intended use of the device.

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Taking half of it back :-/

Submitted by dvhart on Mon, 2008-07-07 05:51.

OK, so I take half of it back! This is a really slick device, but it was decidely not "done right". Turns out WD didn't format the drive properly on many of these units, resulting in a journal failure which can't be fixed with fsck (which requires some trickery all by itself since 30 MB of RAM isn't enough to fsck 1 TB!), and requires a reformat! Now... that's ok for me... but what about their target audience? Since it's considered a hack just to get ssh going, just how exactly is Joe User supposed to recover from this:

<1>journal_bmap: journal block not found at offset 1036 on md4
<3>Aborting journal on device md4.
<2>EXT3-fs error (device md4) in ext3_new_inode: Journal has aborted
<4>__journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
<4>__journal_remove_journal_head: freeing b_frozen_data
<2>EXT3-fs error (device md4) in ext3_create: Journal has aborted
<2>ext3_abort called.
<2>EXT3-fs error (device md4): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal
<2>Remounting filesystem read-only

I found a new resource for others looking at Hacking WD MyBook World Ed. Check it out, all you need to know - it will even run CUPS and MediaTomb! So I guess I should thank WD for screwing up the device so bad, otherwise the prices wouldn't have dropped and I'd be stuck with a USB attached dumb-drive :-)

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