First thing I did when I got this unit was drill a bunch of holes in the sides and bottom (9 in each side and 9 in the bottom) to help with air flow).

I began to notice that they only included a 40-pin PATA cable. Turns out the controller doesn't even do ATA-66...sigh. That sort of sucks. That is WAY slower than the 100Mb network port.
 

Looks like SiSoft benchmarks of the average drive speed on this Coolmax ATA-33 (which should be 33Mb/sec theoretical top speed) is 2.8MB/sec (or 22.4Mb/sec) and average 82ms access times. Not great, and FAR short of typical SATA-150 over Gigabit network times. I'll post those since my HTPC has that exact setup. This was on an IBM Deskstar 30GB ATA-33 drive. In my desktop system on a 200GB 16MB cache SATA-150, it is averaging 53MB/sec and 6ms average access times...blech. I assume network overhead adds to that a little, which is why I want to see how the response is from my HTPC SATA-150 drive through the Gigabit (and I can pipe that through a 100Mb switch too, just to compare apples to apples).
 

Just did a test on my HTPC from my main PC over a Gigabit network connection looking at the HTPC running a 200GB 16MB cache SATA-150 drive. Wow. Average bandwidth is only 9MB/sec (which is crappy) but average seek times are sub-5ms (not sure how that is possible). So, I'm back to thinking maybe the coolmax doesn't look so bad (or else I have something VERY wrong with my HTPC). I'm going to make this simpler and just time a 4GB file transfer from the coolmax to my main PC and compare that to a 4GB file transfer from the HTPC...
 

Transferred a 3.58GB directory of The Office avi's from both the HTPC (200GB 16MB cache SATA-150 on Gigabit ethernet) and the Coolmax NAS (30GB 2MB cache ATA-33 on 100Mb ethernet) and here are the results (wow...almost EXACTLY what Sisoft utility got).

HTPC = 9.2MB/sec
Coolmax = 2.8MB/sec

Obviously, this is no where NEAR the full duplex 100Mb ethernet connection's limitations, so that isn't the problem. And even the Gigabit HTPC connection is FAR short of the local drive performance, so there must be some overhead of running file transfers over networking (i.e. you can't take advantage of DMA transfer, etc). HUMMMM.
 

Hum...this old post I did on large file RAM transfers over my gigabit network makes me think I may only be running at 100Mb/sec somewhere in my connection to my HTPC on that post below (since it just so happens that 100Mb ethernet is around 10MB/sec sustained transfer). I'm going to take out my el-cheapo netgear 5-port gigabit switch I just put in and see if that fixes the problem...

-JM
 

Never mind. I'm an idiot. I had my HTPC Gigabit connection plugged into my 100Mb switch in the closet instead of the gigabit switch. After moving it over, I'm getting 38MB/sec from the HTPC over the gigabit network. So, I'm back to being disappointed with the [relative] performance of the Coolmax...
 

Jeff,
Is there anything that can be done to increase the performance of the coolmax? The transfer speed is so slow, I'm considering leaving it plugged into my cpu as a usb connection.

Thank you for your posts, it was the only decent info I was able to find regarding this piece of hardware.
-Edantron
 

Unfortunately, no. And it will do you absolutely no good to plug it in to the USB connecter, either, if my bench marks are correct (see my blog from Feb 18), as it is NOT the 100Base-TX connection that is limiting you, it is the PATA-33 drive controller. This is most unfortunate that they chose to use a 5 year old controller when PATA-133 controllers are so stinking cheap these days and would have dramatically improved transfer speeds.
 

Tank you, you confirm what I see elsewhere, very slow transfert in tcp mode and USB because of he PATA-33 ! And of course, no support and no upgrade possible with update bios or something else.

Good luck !

A must to not buy item !

Sergio.
 

Did you try out the new firmware updates on their website? I wanted to, but I'm afraid to make the drive quit working since the download .rar file has two .bin files compressed in it. I don't know which one to use. I hope you might be able to tell from your knowledge. Thanks.
 

I would recommend installing the update. There's two binary files because one is the firmware and the other is the loader (used to install new firmware). Just follow the instructions in the README file.
 

VxWorks is the old operating system that was used in Cisco Aironet access points. I wonder how much has been changed for the new linksys models, or if the hardware was tweaked too?

Cisco Aironet Access Point Software Configuration Guide for VxWorks
is at:

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/wireless/airo_350/accsspts/ap350scg/index.htm