Are you a person who would instantly die if something happened to all your
data? Well I just happen to be one of those persons who has this disease.
Up until now, I used to rely on one of those IDE drives which you can slot
into your PC - but while it is still attached to the PC, anything could
happen to that drive. I needed to minimize that risk so decided to go for
Network Attached Storage (NAS) - and I have not seen a better NAS solution
than the 玄箱 (Kuro Box)by玄人志向(Kurouto Shikou).
The Kuro Box is the best choice for the following notable reasons.
- Its cheap! at about 14000 yen, this is unbeatable compared
to some of the NAS solutions that Dell offer.
- After opening the Kuro Box, you spend just a few minutes sticking in a hard drive
of any size - for now I have a 300MB drive.
- Kuro Box is set up for Mac, Unix and Windows file sharing.
- It comes with Linux! Well not exactly. After installing the HD, you run the "Kuro Box Firmware Update" which you can download from the official web site. 10 min's after and your Kuro
Box is ready with Linux(Kernel-2.4.17), Samba、netatalk、telnet、ftp、thttpd、perl
+ all the usual's - There are no messy configurations to deal with!
- As Kuro Box is Linux - you can install anything on it - Apache, PHP, MYSQL, Fetchmail,
you can run what ever crons you want etc etc - need I say more?
- Kuro Box is sooo cool, that I purchased another one to back up stuff from the
first Kuro Box.
- Dimensions are 60x173.5x185mm - compact!
Above left:Kuro Box packaging! Above right: You obviously have to open Kuro
Box to stick in yer HD.
Right:The executable which installs Linux etc on your Kuro Box - takes less
than 10 min's.
Below:Logging into Kuro Box via telnet - use freeware Putty cos its free
and much better than most of terminal software that you have to pay for.
Right:The executable which installs Linux etc on your Kuro Box - takes less
than 10 min's.
