8. Under the covers

In this section, I normally take the device under review apart and then photograph the main board, but as described earlier, I couldn't get it apart without breaking it. I was also unable to get command-line access to the MSSII to poke around, so I had to dig up what information I could using other methods. A port-scan "fingerprint" of the device indicated it was based on a Linux Kernel. There were a number of network ports open, but only a couple were interesting. Manually connecting to the web server port told me it was an Apache 2.0.54 with php support. Manually connecting to the print-server port told me that it was supplied by CUPS.

But the best source of information on the software internals of the MSSII came from Maxtor's web site. Maxtor has a Open Source Code Center where the GPL source for many of the included components can be downloaded. Maxtor even supplies a compilation tool-chain for those brave enough to try and build their own firmware.

Browsing through the SSII source tree, I found typical components such as busybox for utilities, Samba for SMB support, mt-daapd for iTunes support and a Linux 2.6 kernel. A copyright file indicated that Marvell held the copyright for portions of the firmware. "Googling" around indicated that the processor in use may be from the Media Vault family and that the software baseline came from Mediabolic.

Maxtor indicated that the device has 64 MB of RAM internally, no flash and the drives each have 16 MB of cache. Maxtor also said the SSII uses a Marvell chipset but didn't specify which one. However, given the SSII's performance, the processor could be the same one used by the Buffalo LinkStation Pro.

Conclusion

Like the original Shared Storage, the Shared Storage II is a solid device with performance that tops our performance charts. The media serving capabilities are a nice feature, as is the RAID support and the bunded "EasyManage" application. Maxtor gets points for providing the the best Apple support I've seen yet in a consumer NAS both in bundled applications and built-in features.

But of course there is room for improvement. In general, the feature set of the SSII, like the original Shared Storage, is smaller than a lot of its competitors. For example, many support FTP and web serving as well as group level permissions. In addition to these capabilities, I would have liked to see better logging and notification features and the ability to spin down idle drives. And finally, for its RAID capabilities, I would have liked to see support for swapping out a failed drive.

But despite these shortcomings, the SSII is a solid product that raises the performance bar for consumer-level NAS devices.

Join our discussion on this topic