Noob needs help with LS210d

[babybio]

I have never used an NAS before so apologies if some of my questions are a bit basic.

I bought a 2nd hand LS210D to use as a shared storage drive that I can access from any of my PCs. The 210 is connected to my home router/modem and the PC I am using to manage it is running Win10 and is also connected by eth cable to the same router.

I have downloaded NAS Navigator from the Buffalo site and installed it and it sees my 210 and I can enter the nas settings.

1   The main problem I have is the firmware update. Navigator reports that the firmware is 1.65-0.12. Looking at the product download page here https://www.buffalo-technology.com/productpage/linkstation-ls210d/ it shows the latest firmware to be 1.75. From reading the manual I understand that it should check for new firmware during boot and display a message if it is available. I don't have any message and if I go into the firmware check in the advanced settings and do a manual check it says that it is using the latest firmware.

Reading the latest firmware release notes there have been quite a few updates since the version mine is running and several of those included security fixes so I am keen to get mine updated.

Why is my 210 not seeing the newer firmware available? Is there something I can do to fix this?

Should I download the manual updater from the product page above and install that way?

2   By default it is set to using an ntp server. This seems to have picked up the correct time but the timezone was showing as Japan. Should it have picked up my timezone automatically from my internet connection? I have set it manually to my current location. Does the time zone setting make any difference or will my pc just alter the dispayed times of files into local time from their utc time stamp.

I see from the manual that it is possible to set the nas to go to sleep at certain times. I suppose setting the time zone would make those settings easier to set.

3   As I said I bought it 2nd hand. The seller claimed it has had very little use but I am a concerned that the drive sounds a bit noisy. It may just be that it is running in a very open casing so sounds louder than I would expect but it makes some occasional 'ping' noises that I associate with a worn disk. I have run the disk check in the settings but it doesn't give any information.

Is it possible to run any other disk checking apps from my pc on the nas drive? Is there any way I can identify the drive in the ls210 other than trying to dismantle the casing?

4   I have another pc running linux. Is it possible to access the ls210 settings directly from a browser without going through Navigator?

thanks

[1000001101000]

1. Lots of people have noticed (including me) that autoupdate doesn't seem to work any more for this generation of devices and some older ones. I haven't looked into why but the manual updater should work just fine.

2. It does not automatically try to detect your location, you need to set that under settings somewhere.

3. I believe you can connect to command line and run smartctl to view the SMART data for the drive and assess its health. A tool for gaining commandline access can be found here:
https://github.com/1000001101000/acp-commander

4. Yes, you should be able to access it via a web browser at the device's ip address.

If you ended up needing to replace the drive, I have some pictures of the inside of the device and notes about taking it apart here:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Linkstation_LS210D

[babybio]

Thanks for the reply and the help. I managed to run smartctl via the gui acp commander. The drive passed the test and reported only 45 hours use. I think the noise is just that the 210 case is so thin and has the large vents on the top that the drive sounds louder than one running in a normal pc case. I had been concerned whether it had had more use than the seller was indicating.

Having established that I updated the firmware to the latest version using the manual installer and that went fine.

Now I just need to go back and read the manual and get it set up to work as I want.

I see your site has info on installing debian on to the 210. I am not intending on trying that any time soon but what are the advantages of doing that? Are you still running it as and nas or doing something else with it?

[1000001101000]

There are a few advantages. It allows you to install any program that you want and to use newer versions of programs like samba, which allows you to enable things like SMB3 if you want. It also allows you to use the USB port with any device that the Linux kernel supports rather than just USB drives. The ability to run newer programs gets more important the longer the devices get out of support, many of the older devices don't even support SMB2.


The main disadvantage is that there is some linux knowledge/manual configuration required, particularly for samba. Some folks have used configuration programs like OMV and Webmin to varying levels of success they both run pretty slow on these devices. Also, some of the stock firmware features are not open-source. So if you rely on something like webaccess you'd need to find a different solution under Debian.

[babybio]

Thanks. As I say I won't be rushing to try it but I will keep your site bookmarked just in case.