NSLU2 Question

[macollin]

Hello – I just ordered an NSLU2 and before it arrives I was hoping to have a couple questions answered:

-I currently have a 200GB external hard drive reasonably full of songs. It is formatted as NTFS. I have been reading the documentation on this site and others and found that the NSLU2 does support NTFS with the new firmware. Should I go this route? Or reformat as EXT3? Are there speed implications going with one versus the other?

-If I do go the NTFS route, should I also purchase a USB flash drive for mt-daap?

-I rip all of my music with iTunes. iTunes places all of my music in Artist/Album folders. Will this be OK for the NSLU2, or should all of my music be in one folder?

Thanks in advance.

[rpedde]

@macollin wrote:

-I currently have a 200GB external hard drive reasonably full of songs. It is formatted as NTFS. I have been reading the documentation on this site and others and found that the NSLU2 does support NTFS with the new firmware. Should I go this route? Or reformat as EXT3? Are there speed implications going with one versus the other?

Mine is ext3, and my understanding is that NTFS formatted drives are slow. Might not be a problem though. One could always try it and see.

-If I do go the NTFS route, should I also purchase a USB flash drive for mt-daap?

I’m assuming this would be for unslung? Yeah. If you can unsling it to a flash drive, it will be considerably faster.

-I rip all of my music with iTunes. iTunes places all of my music in Artist/Album folders. Will this be OK for the NSLU2, or should all of my music be in one folder?

That’ll work okay.. That’s how mine are — I rsync them to my slug.

— Ron

[macollin]

Thanks for the quick response Ron. This has spawned a couple more questions…

-Is there anyway I can try it with my NTFS drive without using a USB flash drive and without formating?

-What do you mean by “rsync”?

And yes, I plan to use unslung.

Thanks again.
Matt

[rpedde]

@macollin wrote:

-Is there anyway I can try it with my NTFS drive without using a USB flash drive and without formating?

Not that I know. But there are others around here using NTFS, maybe they will chime in. Fizze, for example, was using NTFS I think.

-What do you mean by “rsync”?

It’s a file synchronization tool. Like xcopy, only it just synchronized changed files. That way I keep my “master” iTunes on my mac and sync it to the slug for sharing with my SB.

It’s built in to mac, if that’s what you have, otherwise a good tool might be Unison to copy to a windows (samba) share from a windows box.

— Ron

[g0pkh]

Hi.

I am pretty much doing the same as Ron, I currently have 2 cheap 80GB drives attached to my slug (both ext3 formatted).

My main windows pc holds my itunes database, and I use Microsoft’s SYNCTOY utility, to syncronise my PC Master iTunes database to the slug’s samba share.

The slug is then setup to do a disk / disk backup using rsync to the second drive, rather belt and braces I know, but the drives are so cheap now that its worth doing it, currently my database is fairly small just 5300 songs.
I may revise things again later as it continues to increase in size 🙂

[cromei]

-Is there anyway I can try it with my NTFS drive without using a USB flash drive and without formating?

From the Unslung web pages:
The root device for Unslung must be natively formatted by the NSLU2 (i.e. it is not sufficient that it simply be formatted as ext3).

I have heard most people like the performance of the datastick in port 2 for the unslung drive and hard drives in port 1 for data and music.
Craig

[macollin]

Thanks to everyone for their responses.

One final question…I now have the means to either go with:
-A 256MB USB Flash drive + an NTFS external
OR
-The external formatted as EXT3

Which do you recommend (especially when considering speed of access and stability)?

[cromei]

I like the 256 flash and NTFS external, since you can still attach (easily) the extenal drive to any computer.
Craig

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