How to get a Simpleshare NAS to recognize an USB drive?

December 12, 2007 6:19 PM

I need help with a Simpleshare NAS. Details are below if you have experience with the device.

I've had a Simpleshare 250 for a year with no problems. I just bought an external USB to plug into it to use the built in RAID to mirror my data as I've been living dangerously without a backup.

It's not working. The Simpleshare does not see the USB drive at all. I know the USB drive is working fine, I can read and write to it from XP. The Simpleshare is running with NFS support as I access it from both XP and Ubuntu. I've tried formatting it as both NTFS and Fat32 to no effect. I'm running the 1.07 firmware on the NAS. The Simpleshare website and user manual offer no help, and I didn't find anything via Google either.

Any ideas?

posted by COD to Technology (6 answers total)

Have you run the wizard that the manual mentions? My guess would be that it actually wants to partition and format the drive itself, to ext2 or ext3.
posted by pompomtom at 7:32 PM on December 12, 2007

Response by poster: The wizard won't run because it doesn't recognize that I've plugged a USB drive into it.
posted by COD at 7:38 PM on December 12, 2007

I just bought an external USB to plug into it to use the built in RAID to mirror my data as I've been living dangerously without a backup.

RAID is not backup. It may be better than nothing, but it's not really a backup.
posted by philomathoholic at 12:06 AM on December 13, 2007

From the disk management page --> foreign disks "This device can only read from NTFS formated USB drives. To read and write from/ to your USB drive, you need to erase (Wipe/ Erase Disk Page) the drive then format it in DOS FAT (Disk Management/ Basic Page.)"

You firmware is old, 1.09 is current and it also have a good help section.
posted by Ferrari328 at 6:10 AM on December 13, 2007

Response by poster: Actually, I had 1.09 and when I checked last night 1.07 was shown as newer, and it had a more recent date. I'm guessing they pulled 1.09 for some reason? After it didn't work with 1.09 I downgraded (or upgraded) to 1.07 to see if that would help. Obviously it didn't. The only really significant change that I noticed going back to 1.07 was that I lost web access to the files, which is not a big deal for me anyway.

I understand the NTFS / FAT32 issue. However, the Simpleshare does not see any disk attached at all. If it could see the disk I'd claim it and let it reformat to the whatever file system it uses so that the mirroring will work. However, read or write access is moot if the thing doesn't recognize that there is a USB drive attached in the first place.
posted by COD at 10:04 AM on December 13, 2007

Response by poster: Update: I head back from Tech Support. Since I can't get any USB device to be recognized by the Simpleshare they think the USB ports are dead. It's a 3 year warranty so I'm good - should be getting a new one once I work through the RMA bureaucracy.
posted by COD at 10:43 AM on December 13, 2007