With no disks the unit has no operating system, support on the web is almost non existent and so odds of getting the restore disks are not good.
The internal workings are basically a PC - you've got 2 PCI slots, standard memory DIMMS (266MHZ) and a Celeron 2.5 GHZ.
It's got everything to run linux or similar so I thought I would get something like FreeNAS running.
FreeNAS is now 64 bit so I wanted a simpler NAS , NAS4Free runs 32 or 64 bit so I downloaded this.
The Motherboard didn't seem to be the worlds greatest booting from a USB pen drive so I burnt a CD, mounted a CD into a USB adapter and it booted OK from that.
10 minutes later and NAS4Free is installed.
Before it got to the reboot prompt it even told me what settings to use to mount the drive once I got the system booted and running stand alone.
The Nas200D has a VGA output, 1Gig network and USB front and rear so while setting I was installing it was easy as any PC to go into the BIOS, set boot order and get the NAS4Free Operating system installed.
The only issue I had which took any brain power was when I set a mount point (I'm the only user on this NAS) I set a mount point as Nas200D, forgetting that this would effectively move the mount point from /mnt to /mnt/Nas200D - so when I set my user mount point as /mnt/kevin I was effectively outside the mount point - DOH !
A quick change of the mount point (for user kevin) as /mnt/Nas200D/kevin and everythings working.
It zips along really well, the system has 2 fans so it runs really quiet - I've only one disk in at the moment (2TB) but I'm really impressed.
Effectively NAS4Free has given life to a unit that would sit there unless someone has the recovery disks - I'm very impressed with the simplicity of the software.
It has settings for everything, produces graphs, has a graphical file manager and more.
