I use a Drobo that is hooked up to the PogoPlug.  It works great.  I then put Pogoplug’s driver on the Windows 2008 file server in the headquarter.  This creates network drives on the server that is mapped to my PogoPlug drives.  I then use SyncToy on the file server to sync the various directories to my PogoPlug drives.

While this works reasonably well, I noticed that there are some directories that always were said to be required syncing but I failed to find what were different between the 2 ends.  SyncToys has some option to determine the algorithm use to detect changes.  By default, it simply checks to file size, access/update time to determine if it needs to sync the files.

I tried the option to check the file content to determine if a file needs to be updated.  This proves to be too resource intensive as it needs to read the entire remote file to determine a checksum  for comparison purpose.  With my setup, this takes way too long to complete (I have close to 2TB worth of data, many of them are video files).

I am trying out Unison (from UPENN) and Rsync.  Rsync is interesting in that a local server on the PogoPlug is required (and it exists in the OpenPogo site).  While I haven’t try it out yet, it seems to me such a solution might be a good one for such kind of remote syncing.

The client side can calculate the local checksum while the remote server side can calculate the checksum locally as well.  Then it would be simple to compare and they don’t even have to be synchronized.

I will report back with my findings…

I have a 1 TB Mybook USB2 drive and a Drobo v2 attached to it.  The Drobo itself have about 2TB worth of media, as this is a remote backup copy of media assets of my volunteer group.  While trying to encode the preview segments, the PogoPlug become so overloaded (after all, it doesn’t have a very powerful processor) that it frequently dropped the drives.

Pogoplug would report that there was no drives attached to the device.  Unplugging and replugging helped for a while for it to recognize that something is attached, but it would refused to show its content.  After a short while, it would say that there were no drives again.

I ended up deleting the .cedata (which PogoPlug keeps its configuration data as well as the cache for the preview segments of the media it has encoded).  After doing so, the PogoPlug essentially thinks that the drive is ‘new’ to it.  I quickly disable the preview generation on all the drives.  It was then ‘stable’.

However, I noticed that I cannot access some directory properly.  I ended up running chkdsk on all the drives to make sure that the NTFS directores were not screw up by all the plugging and unplugging.  Chkdsk did find a few problems which it fixed.  After that, accessing those directories on the Pogoplug were fine.

I have to say, during these frustrated hours, Pogoplug’s forum has been very helpful.  Also, the developers are quite responsive to requests and suggestions.

I do love this device.  It is not quite perfect yet, but it serves its purpose very well.

What surprised me was that after the firmware was upgraded, I could not see all my drives that’s attached.  I have a WD 1TB My Book and a Drobo attached to it.  I reset, detached the drives repeatedly but the Pogoplug was unable to see all the drives consistently.

Until I realized that the new firmware was generating previews and transcoding some of the video clips into a format that Pogoplug’s web player can use.  While it doesn’t transcode the entire video clips, it does transcode a 10-15 sec segment of it.  This process, depending on what you stored on the drives, can cause the system to be really slow.

I ended up stopping the scanning process to generate the previews of all the media on all the drives.  PogoPlug then return to normal.  The extra load in transcoding resulted in the Pogoplug being bogged down by the trascoding processes that prevent it from recognizing the new devices.

Being able to preview a segment of the video clip is good, but I wish Pogoplug can do it like the “Orb” network, which will simply become a streaming server to send the video clip across.

After the firmware upgrade, all my OpenPogo installed program still works well (I only installed the Samba server anyway).  Heard that the new firmware does use more space, resulting in less ‘user’ space for custom installation of software.

Haven’t got too much time to play around yet… will report back later.

After living with the 2 Plug computers for 2 months now, I have the following conclusion:

1.  Consumer: Pogoplug

I have to say I love the Desktop Virtual drive that Pogoplug provides.  This device has the average consumer in mind.  While it doesn’t offer as many application as TonidoPlug, it simply works.  The only con I can think of is that its web interface won’t support playing of video.  I am not sure if I am not smart enought to get it to work or it is simply not supported.  Photo and Music plays fine directly from web interface.

2. Geeks: TonidoPlug

The applications support is simply awesome.  They recently added a package that you can do https connection with the device.  Granted it wasn’t a commercial certificate, but nonetheless, it allows you to connect to your device without worrying about evedropping (good for say connecting from corporate network back to home).

The various applications are updated regularly and new ones have been added.  I have not actually play with them much.  However, the torrent client, by itself, is worth the money I think.  Low power torrent machine is a great thing to have!

PogoPlug just came out with its V2 hardware  It looks really slick and come with 4 ports USB 2.0 instead of 1 (which you can get a USB 2.0 hub to do the same).  Price has increase to $129 though…

This is a simple 5 bay, port multiplier enabled (Silicon Image, Sil3726 I believe) enclosure, connected to the NAS box via a USB2 to eSATA converter which I have mentioned before.  Each bay is a 1TB drive of various makes.

I performed a scrub and to my surprise, there were a few errors, but thanks to the RAIDZ, nothing is lost.  The scrub finished without any issue, but I still could not access the 2 directories over CIFS.  I can access other directories just fine.  When I ssh into the box, the content of the directory is intact… this would point to the CIFS/SMB service being the source of the issue.

I tried to copy the content to another directory within the same volume using simple cp or rsync.  Strangely, the new directory also could not be access over CIFS/SMB.  I am suspecting that the UTF-8 filenames of files might have something to do with it.  Since I first observed this problem in snv_121, I thought, why not boot to snv_118 with the wonderful snapshot that each upgrade took before the installation.

So I chose to boot to the previous snapshot.  Then tried to access the drive…. DRIVES WERE NOT ACCESSABLE!  Perform a zpool status, showed that the volume I had issue with was OFFLINE, all the HD in the enclosure was indicated as OFFLINE.  “My God, did I lose everything?!”  I thought to myself.

I rebooted the enclosure and wait for power-up.  Did the zpool status again.  Okay, everyting was reported to be fine.  Go to that storage pool…. IT WAS EMPTY!!!  “OMG, I really did lose everything!!!”

I rebooted the NAS box to go back to snv_121, thinking that the new ZFS version might caused snv_118 not to recognize it…. again, the storage pool has good status, but have no data.  Suddenly, it dawned on me that I read somewhere to export the volume and reimport it.  So I tried that…. IT WORKED!  The storage pool came back to live with everything intact.

So a lesson learnt…. if you run into a problem like this, tried to do an zpool export <poolname> and zpool import <poolname>.  I am not sure why ZFS didnt’ automatically recognize the data.  I didn’t dare to do a scrub since I have no idea how distructive it could have been…  I hope this helps someone out there who might have similar issue.

From my current experience with both, the two are about equal.

Application Support Winner: TonidoPlug

I must say, I am really impressed with the various Apps already available on the TonidoPlug.  I am especially happy with the TonidoTorrent.  Now, I can have a torrent client that runs 24×7 with very low power usage.  If I can somehow get an eMule client on it, this is a perfect machine.

Hardware Design: Draw

The two devices are virtually identifcal.  I think the Tonido website was a bit misleading in that it showed that the device had a slot for putting in an SD card or something.  I tried hard, but I wasn’t able to make anything give to show that slot.  TonidoPlug does have 256MB more RAM, which probably gave it a slight advantage in the number of application that it can run simultaneously.

Integration and usage: PogoPlug

While Tonido has superior application support, I cannot say enough good things about the ability to show PogoPlug as a network drive on your computer.  It is the single most important feature it has.

In relative terms, PogoPlug’s setup is much easier, it doesn’t require any tweaks to the Router etc, simply because there just isn’t much to configure.  On the other hand, you will need to establish a profile on Tonido’s website and open the admin port to allow remote administration.  While it is a piece of cake for the hackers among us, it may not be a trivia task for the public.

So take your pick.  I think if you want to use it as a simple server, TonidoPlug wins hands down.  For simple file sharing, I think PogoPlug is the way to go.

Both Tonido and Sheeva are slightly more powerful (contain more RAM) and have SD card expansion.  However, PogoPlug has the essential piece of software that makes it a better product for my use: Network Drive Client.  A pogoplug can appear as a network drive on your local machine.  CloudeEngine has clients in Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.

What I am planning of using the Pogoplug is as follows:

1) Use the Drobo that I have as a remot backup unit.

2) Connect the Drobo to Pogoplug

3) On remote machine, install network drive client and connect to the PogoPlug.

4) Use directory sync program to sync daily changes: SyncToy or FreeFileSync (as suggested by one of the visitors to this site)

Cheap and easy disater recovery site can be setup like this.  I will let you know how it goes.

I have also ordered a TonidoPlug to evaluate.  These little machines are amazing in that they are really small computers.  TonidoPlug runs Ubuntu 9.04 which means that developing or packaging software for it should be quite doable.  These plug computers use ARM processors which are very power efficient.  I may soon use the TonidoPlug to do my torrent downloads instead of using a laptop.

Pogoplug is the size of a small power brick, but it is literally a small embedded Linux plateform.  There was literally no configuration required.  You plug the device into your router and power it up.  Hook up a spare USB2 HD and magically, you have Internet enabled storage system.

The device required no configuration at all.  It connects to PogoPlug’s website and takes care of NAT traversal automatically.  You can access the content via PogoPlug’s website or install a software package to use it as a local HD.

I am testing it out right now but am planning to use this as a way to sync across Internet to provide some off-site backup.  I volunteer for a non-profit organization that generates a ton of photos and video.  I am planning to us this device to provide off-site backup.  It would be very simple to do the initial data backup directly using locally attached HD, then connect this to the PogoPlug.  Future syncing could use SyncToy on a local machine in the HQ to the PogoPlugged device.  Fairly low cost off-site backup I think…

While I understand the above, the upgrade still makes me a bit uneasy…. after biting my finger a few times, I decided to go ahead with the upgrade.  I fired up the Update Manager and chose to upgrade all packages…  I wasn’t watching the progress, but continue to write to the NAS while the upgrade was in progress.  I think this is important because it means that uptime wax maximized even during an upgrade.

After reboot, the new version came up flawlessly.  I haven’t yet seen any performance improvement per se with my daily use (only used it for 2 days)… but will report back if I find anything interesting.

All in all, everything was where it was supposed to be… OpenSolaris is really quite a matured OS.

My main pool of storage is on 6 1TB WD Green Drive.  2 of them are on the Atom 330 MB with Intel 945G’s built-in SATA port and 4 on the Sil3124 add-on card.  The 6 disks are formatted into a RAIDZ volume.  Performance number is around 14MB/s write and 6.5MB/s read.  The writing, while averaging 14MB/s, fluctuate a lot.  I wasn’t sure if it was due to the CPU, Interface or network interface.

I also have another Sil4726 storage box that has 5 WD 1TB Green drive that I have hook up to the NAS via a USB2 to eSATA converter.  The 5 drives has also been formatted as a RAIDZ volume.  Because it is on USB2, I was not as keen on using it as the main storage pool.  However, I just found some old drives with older data archive that I decided to move to this storage volume.

To my surprise, this pool of storage is able to substain a 14MB/s write with almost no fluctuation in speed (again, i am just looking at the number reported by Teracopy).

I have 2 theory on this observation:

1) Atom 330′s max performance for RAIDZ is maybe around 14MB/s on OpenSolaris.

2) It was a surprise to me that the USB2 pool is actually able to sustained that kind of write speed, which is faster than through native SATA.  Therefore, I think that the PCI interface card is too limiting in the bandwidth that the write speed actually fluctuate so much.  The USB2 interface, while technically inferior in speed, was linked more closely to the southbridge that it is actually faster.  You probably will get better performane with a higher end PCI Express add-on card if you build a NAS on a more powerful MB.