Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B Network Storage

Out of interest where did you pluck the £200 for NAS+2x1tb drives from? I've not seen any sub ~£70 on my searches.

Hmmm this seems very interesting, torrenting and file backup. Just need to sort my network problem..

Originally Posted by BioSniper
Out of interest where did you pluck the £200 for NAS+2x1tb drives from? I've not seen any sub ~£70 on my searches.

I was being liberal with the math, I should have said "about" £200 - If you can find a couple of teras for £60-65 then that's only £215-220ish and HDD prices are coming down all the time.

Ah fair enough, its an interpretation thing on my part then :)

Cheers for the review though, I had been eyeing these up but they are still too expensive imo. Good if you don't want to mess around with building a dedicated box and lower power for sure.

Speaking of a dedicated box, any plans to do a little feature on roll-your-own NAS boxes?
I've ended up using my old gaming PC (not the most power efficient setup I'll admit) with FreeNAS which I'm pretty happy with. I'd guess most B-T readers have enough old hardware lying around to build something out of.

Originally Posted by BioSniper
Ah fair enough, its an interpretation thing on my part then :)

Cheers for the review though, I had been eyeing these up but they are still too expensive imo. Good if you don't want to mess around with building a dedicated box and lower power for sure.

To be honest, once you've factored in something cheap like an Atom board, PSU (+ power brick which are usually separate), memory, a nice case (!! hard to find on the cheap) I doubt it's possible to get all that for less than £95. Not to mention the fact fiddling with the OS also takes times.

Phuzz - I was going to do an build guide for FreeNAS last year, and I might still do, but it's just hard to find the time :(

Originally Posted by article
The Storlink SL3516 is paired with two 512Mb (128MB in total) RAM and

what am I missing here??

That's one nice looking box, too bad we get price-raped here as the box alone costs 210 € here.

512Mb = 64MB

b = bits
B = bytes

Not a bad box, especially on the price. I think I am going to be sticking with the HP homeserver through for what I need.

Originally Posted by DougEdey
512Mb = 64MB

b = bits
B = bytes

Sneaky buggers! Did that on purpose :( I prefer our Mb and Mt.

That would have to be the best looking NAS box I have seen to date. The price and performance are pretty good also lol.

I have one of these and have been a fan of Icy Box products for quite a while but now i would he hesitant in recommending them to anyone. The print server functionality on my NAS box has just stopped working, i have reflashed the firmware and tried various things but it still wont work. An IcyBox RAID backplane at work also stopped working and there is no technical support at all from IcyBox. The only way to contact them is via a web form which you never get a response from.

Originally Posted by Da_Rude_Baboon
I have one of these and have been a fan of Icy Box products for quite a while but now i would he hesitant in recommending them to anyone. The print server functionality on my NAS box has just stopped working, i have reflashed the firmware and tried various things but it still wont work. An IcyBox RAID backplane at work also stopped working and there is no technical support at all from IcyBox. The only way to contact them is via a web form which you never get a response from.

:(

All things well and good - we might have a forum on here soon for you to get that tech support. No promises because nothing has been signed yet though afaik.

It seems a shame to put something that looks as good as that away in a cupboard. And when you were talking about a DIY NAS box up thread, is there any need to have a nice case for it? so long as the case works and doesn't cook the hard drives, is there any need for it to look good as it can just be hidden "under the stairs"?

If I am right in thinking that hard drives only produce heat when spinning, which would make sense, it seems strange that a temperature controlled fan doesn't spin down when the only major heat producing items are turned off.

Originally Posted by Da_Rude_Baboon
I have one of these and have been a fan of Icy Box products for quite a while but now i would he hesitant in recommending them to anyone. The print server functionality on my NAS box has just stopped working, i have reflashed the firmware and tried various things but it still wont work. An IcyBox RAID backplane at work also stopped working and there is no technical support at all from IcyBox. The only way to contact them is via a web form which you never get a response from.

Hi Da_Rude_Baboon

Where did you go for Technical support? Please send me a private message with your problems and I will assit you. Flashing your firmware to the latest version should have fixed any issues or you max have encountered a problem while flashing or have a incorrect configuration.

Is there any third party Linux firmware available for this device? I was recently made aware of the Linksys NSLU2, which (after a custom firmware flash) can have a normal Linux system installed on it and then work as a web server, file server or whatever you like...
Since the NSLU2 is almost impossible to get hold of, I'd be interested in knowing if there is any similar custom firmware available for the Icy Box. There seems to be quite a community at http://nas-4220.org/, but I think this is all based on the standard firmware...

I've also just read there that this system isn't so great with Samsung hard drives at the moment...

Originally Posted by NKW
Hi Da_Rude_Baboon

Thank you NKW. I will send you a PM.

Originally Posted by Pricester
Is there any third party Linux firmware available for this device? I was recently made aware of the Linksys NSLU2, which (after a custom firmware flash) can have a normal Linux system installed on it and then work as a web server, file server or whatever you like...
Since the NSLU2 is almost impossible to get hold of, I'd be interested in knowing if there is any similar custom firmware available for the Icy Box. There seems to be quite a community at http://nas-4220.org/, but I think this is all based on the standard firmware...

I've also just read there that this system isn't so great with Samsung hard drives at the moment...

Good Morning all!

Hi Pricester, I'm not 100% sure on the developments for third party firmware however in recent discussions with a Linux enthusiast they said that this is possible. Many mods are being created and I’ve heard that a gentleman in central Europe can turn his heating on and off remotely via the NAS4220 and this experimenting is what I would like to encourage.

If anyone has some ideas of what features could be added please send me a PM and we can discuss this, and if you that feel you can write mods/firmware changes yourself I would really like to encourage you and offer support and possible sponsorship.

As for Samsung drives the first firmware did have issues operating them, I understand that the latest firmware has fixed these problems. different models of hard drives operate in various ways, so the big advantage of the open source is to keep releasing official and third-party updates which can fix any known issues.

:Really nice review (as always :D) Shame it costs 200€ over here. Plus 2 tera drives and you are at 400€. :( To much for my pockets.
As others sad, a freeNAS tutorial would be cool. I tryed it but didnt get it working proper.

I've had one of these for around a year, paired it up with two 500GB Seagate HD's and haven't had a problem since. It just sits in my computer room upstairs with all my music, movies etc. on it. Twonky Media is a great inclusion (even if it's just a 30 day trial, just means restarting the NAS every 30 days), it means my Kiss 1600 Media Streamer connected to my TV downstars pulls everything straight off my Icy-Box NAS so I don't have to leave my PC on.

The only slight issue I have is the network performance, copying files to and from can take some time. This seems to apply to all NAS's of this price though, cost has to be cut somehere, and the poor 300Mhz CPU can't keep up.

All in all, it's an increadibly stable piece of kit. It's never crashed etc. on me in the time I've had it. It's also great to see a member of the Icy-Box team here on Bit-tech ectively ancouraging trying to mod it. A linux install would be nice, but too much hassle imo, when the default firmware works so well.

My experience with these boxes is poor. The old model wasn't compatible with all hard drives (like the £250 worth of drives I had just bought) and they had to revise the board. They did say it could be upgraded, but the cost was almost as much as the Icybox in the first place. The RAID was also very un-RAID like one day when one hard drive failed, the "mirrored" drive failed as well. Lost everything.
I've gone down the Dlink route after reading good reviews and few reported problems. It's also much quicker on the LAN - the Icybox is really poor in this respect. Oh, yea, the printer server thing never did work either.

Hi UltraKev

If you had the earlier model which had the old chipset the upgrade to the later version is free, where did you contact for this support & receive information about an upgrade cost?

I'm pretty sure that your configuration was wrong as the mirrored RAID configuration failed and also the print server did not work, had you run a firmware update on the device?

Anyone ever cracked the "SMB randomly stopping" problem? I bought it as a NAS for windows boxes at home, so if SMB stops, and it does, frequently, then it's useless. Getting money back from scan is more painful than dental work so i'd like to try and fix it. I've tried a few of the things on the forums out there but there's nothing definitive and nothing has worked so far. So - anyone here have this problem or knows how to fix it?