ARGOSY - HD363N - Network Storage

[BobVal]

I have just purchased a Argosy - HD363N Network Storage Enclosure and
put in my Maxtor 200 gig drive.

This Enclosure connects to your router by RJ45 and allows adding
Network storage cheaply.

It supports Fat16, Fat32.

The problems I am having:

1) When the drive wakes up after being unsed for a while it does not
allways connect properly and needs to be restarted.

2) I copied all the files I needed to the drive and have just used
applications that READ only from the drive but do not write and now I
have files that are corrupted.


Is anyone using this Network Enclosure?
Are you having any of these problems?

Bob Valentino

 

[brady47]

I have just purchased a Argosy - HD363N Network Storage Enclosure and
put in my Maxtor 200 gig drive.

This Enclosure connects to your router by RJ45 and allows adding
Network storage cheaply.

It supports Fat16, Fat32.

The problems I am having:

1) When the drive wakes up after being unsed for a while it does not
allways connect properly and needs to be restarted.

2) I copied all the files I needed to the drive and have just used
applications that READ only from the drive but do not write and now I
have files that are corrupted.


Is anyone using this Network Enclosure?
Are you having any of these problems?

Bob Valentino

Hey BobVal, I have one too and am not having any problems yet at all. I
have a couple of gigs of files on there, lots of pictures(they are
being indexed no problem by google's Picasa2) and I'm even serving
about 12 gigs of MP3s to my audiotron(the discovery of songs doesn't
work properly, but if you manually create a TOC it works fine).

I would tend to think that the waking up problem is probably DHCP
related. The device can act as HCP server and client I believe, so
check to see what you have enabled, or better yet just use static(that
is how I have mine).I am pretty sure this device uses smb to share
folders.

There is also a telnet server on the device. Use Putty if you are on
windows and use the same admin and password you configured through the
web interface to login. Quite a few commands available and you can
really configure the thing from the telnet line if you want to. Just
type help after you are logged in to get a complete command reference.

I love this device so far and am very interested in hacking around with
it, specifically understanding the OS. Here is a pic of the board in it
if you are interested(warning, pretty large picture)

http://www.bradandsasha.com/images/HD-363N_Board.jpg

Good Luck

 

[BobVal]

Brandy47:

I am not using the DHCP Server option
I was using the Automatic IP option will try Static IP

Thanks

BobVal

 

[rokitrik]

I have purchassed two of these units and am having the same issues
with both. I have tried several different hard disk drives in them
to see if perhaps it was a drive issue. Also when opening a file
from the drive and then trying to save it back, it tells me that I
can not save it back to the drive as there isa lready a file with
that name and it can not be over written. Attempting to do backups
to this deveice also gives me Windows write cache errors and stops
the backup.

 

[jonnybb1]

Here is a good one for you, I cannot use WINXP-HOME with sp2 and all
the latest updates with this device. When I try to create a new
folder (right click add folder) in the shared directory (in Network
Nieghborhood) the window hangs and says UNABLE TO CREATE "New Folder"
THE FILE ALREADY EXISTS.

And all the files I did copy over are READ-ONLY.

The twist to all of this, is that the LINUX and MAC computers that are
using SMB hae no problems at all!!

 

[rokitrik]

Have been working with Argosy about the issue with the HD363N and have
received a firmware upgrade that has fixed the problem. I have
upgraded my firmware on all of my units and all are working fine.

If you are interested in the firmware I will gladly email it to you if
you contact me: (e-mail address removed) or (e-mail address removed)

 

[ukcobra]

I too have a couple of these devices and see some wierd lockups on my
main PC, and no issues on 2 others.

I also have some questions around the FTP server, as I cannot get that
to work. More on that when I solve the lockup issue.

What backup software is supposed to come with this, as the the specs
at pcmicrostore indiate it should have shipped with some.....

Rick, I have emailed you directly for the firmware file.

Regards

Mark

Runnig XP-Pro SP2 on all machines.
athlon XP2000 server - has lockups when accessig the device at the
directory level.
Toshiba Tecra Laptop - has no issues with the device
Shuttle SK43G - has no issues with the device

 

[ukcobra]

I have tried the new firmware, and tried to reformat the hard disk.
The reformat only took a few seconds, is this normal for a 250GB disk
?

I would expect a disk to be formatted in Fat32 to take much longer.
The drive was not formatted before use in the HD363N. It was a new
disk.

I look forward to any pointers.

Mark

 

[ukcobra]

Just a quick update, the firmware update has not solved my main server
from hanging when trying to view files located in the public
directory.

This box is going back unless I can get it working with the main
server !

Mark

 

[booq]

FWIW, I've been having similar issues with Argosy. In the process of
troubleshooting, I noticed that the IDE cable it shipped with was a
standard 40wire/40pin cable (i.e. ATA-33). I swapped out this cable
with an 80wire/40pin (ATA-66/100/133) cable and so-far, so good!
YMMV, of course, but something to try.

Argosy's HD-363 product page:
http://www.argosyusa.net/product.asp?product_name=HD363N

And new Firmware as of 25 Mar 2005
http://www.argosyusa.net/driver/Argosy-NetHDD004-0317.zip

 

[donald_wong_oohay]

I just got one of these too and it seems to be working well so far,
except for one hiccup. Does anyone know if it's possible to enable
support for Unicode filenames? I can create files and folders with
Unicode filenames, but I cannot access the newly created file or
folder afterwards.

 

[ukcobra]

The device has stabilised since I have applied later firmware updates.
Has anyone managed to get any software application to use the drive ?

I am interested in un-attended backups for devices on the network,
rather than me keep ftp'ing stuff.

Mark

 

[booq]

ukcobrawrote:
The device has stabilised since I have applied later firmware
updates. Has anyone managed to get any software application to use
the drive ?

I am interested in un-attended backups for devices on the network,

rather than me keep ftp'ing stuff.

Mark

Hi Mark, I haven't done any of this yet, since I had some issues a
couple of days after I had posted above. I now believe that the
problems I had can be attributed to the 160GB Maxtor hard drive I was
trying to use. I switched to a 120GB Samsung and to a 200GB Western
Digital and haven't had *any* issues (knock on wood).

Depending upon which platform and software you're using, you should be
able to create a persistent connection to the Argosy which your backup
software could use. Alternatively some backup software (e.g.
Retrospect) will support backing up directly to FTP servers.

 

[rokitrik]

I am using this device as a mapped drive to my server and using Stomps
Backup MyPC Version 5 software to do scheduled backups nightly. Have
not had any issues with this since upgrading the unit to the latest
Firmware.

 

[BobVal]

Hello:

I have been having some problems with the Argosy Network Drive and I
think I figured out why.

The Argosy Network Drive uses FAT for it's file system, FAT uses a
FIXED Allocation Block size for files. I have a 200 gig drive in there
and for FAT to reference it all it MUST use 32K as the file allocation
size.

Now I have been trying to copy 11,128 files that take up 92 gig to this
drive. The drive I am copying from is using NTFS which uses variable
file allocation size.

The same amount of files copied to the Argosy Network Drive would
require 300+ gig. Because for each file the Argosy uses 32k. My
average file size is 8 - 10k but on the Windows XP NTFS, but on the
Argosy they will all be 32k. Using 3 times as much storage as needed.

I think I need to find a different solution that uses a variable
allocation size like NTFS used by windows XP, etc.

Bob Valentino

 

[Loc]

I'm new here. There's not too much resources on the web about this
device and the documentation is regrettable. This thread seems to be
the only resource I can find through google

I just got this and everything worked just fine. I was watching data
transfer speeds in Windows task manager and the fastest was around
50% of my 100mbps network for a cd ISO image. It was 30% for my
smaller random files I was backing up.

Is there something slowing my data transfer speed? When I transfer
files from one computer to another across the network I'm getting
about 85% readings.

I'm familar with *nix commands but this isn't quite the same. Is there
documentation on the commands used in this device?

 

[BZMAN]

As far as I know that you can call Argosyusa 626-338-2522 to get the
support on this enclsoure. Or email (e-mail address removed).
If you need more of this, I found a cheaper place www.intldirect.com is
the cheapest!!!

 

[Loc]

Is there any way I can speed up read/write times to the enclosure?

 

[rokitrik]

The latest firmware has improved the performance of this device
considerably. This would be NetHDD004-0317. If you need this
firmware you can download it from our web site jarenterprises.com
or go to ArgosyUSA.com and find the HD-363N Product and view the
description which has a link for the current firmware. Do not go to
downloads or support on the Argosy site as you will not find this
there.

Hope this helps.

 

[Loc]

I already had the latest firmware. Just to make sure I flashed it
again and it still tops out at 25% in the task manager. Is this the
current limit fo the enclosure?