So I forgot to update with my experience. This was definitely a steal at $34 shipped (now is $44+ship? at parallel miner and $49 shipped at centrix).
My Seagate 8TB ST8000NM0055-1RM112, firmware SN05 worked right out of the box with no firmware update needed even though one was available. I had some trouble getting the drive to physically connect to the sata connector, but after loosening the mount in the unit a bit by unscrewing it (I saw that it was barely crooked), I was able to get the drive to install.
This is a pretty feature rich nas. Not as feature rich as my Synology, but more than my Intel ss4200-e, Netgear Readynas Ultra on os4, or my WD Cloud EX2. An rsync job between the readynas and ix2 worked well (my main reason for getting the ix2--native rsync server), but exposed the serious drawback of this unit--the cooling.
The fan in this unit does not ramp up the way it needs to and simply lets everything cook. I actually aborted the rsync job test because I saw the temps of the Lenovo start to approach 170F and the fan didn't budge from its ~800rpms even though it is capable of running at ~2000rpms. On the other side, the netgear started to ramp up the fan to keep the components cool as the rsync was taxing both units since the drives in both were capable of saturating gigabit.
Unfortunately, this is fairly well-known issue that was never addressed in these units, and so far I haven't found a way to control the fans via ssh to make them run at 100%. It's so bad, I'm not comfortable adding a second drive in the unit until I can figure out how to cool it better. The fan speed control is via the voltage coming directly from the motherboard too, so there is no way to easily remove a pwm pin and make the fans run 100%. If anyone has an ideas on how to fix this, I'm open to suggestions. At this point, I haven't opened the unit because the little 'warranty void' sticker still acts as a deterrent even though there isn't a real warranty on it.
Aside from the cooling issues and the fact that not all the applications will work due to this being an eol product without any support, it does a decent job of just serving files, although performance is on par with my Intel ss4200-e, which is the slowest (and oldest) of my nas units. This will not saturate gigabit with a single drive, even if the drive is capable of doing so. I haven't done and don't plan on doing any raid0 tests even when I install a second drive, so someone else will have to report on that.
So, I just saw that there is a fanless, 1 drive version of this with 3TB available for $65 at centrix and $48 at parallel miner:
LENOVO IOMEGA EZ Media and Backup Center SM10G08843. Hard Drive: SATA II. Media Server: DLNA certified UPnP server and iTunes server.
www.centrix-intl.com
LENOVO IOMEGA EZ Media and Backup Center 1TB 2TB 3TB. Hard Drive: SATA II. Media Server: DLNA certified UPnP server and iTunes server.
www.parallelminer.com
Considering I found out they're installing new OEM HGST midline enterprise drives in these, that's a pretty solid deal for a nas with a drive. I'm quite tempted myself since these can be remotely updated with rsync and put everywhere.
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