GnuBee FOSS NAS

The GnuBee is a network attached storage device supporting up to 6 sata drives and runs linux with full user control given. I ordered one and it arrived fairly quick considering it was shipped from far away. Assembly is really simple. You just have to attach the side plates to the pcb. When I ordered I couldn’t work out what the USB UART cable was for and did not get one. I later found out that this cable is super important for installing an OS on the GnuBee. I sourced a cable from ebay which worked but this prevented me from using the device for a month.

I found the documentation available online to be really lacking and it took a lot of investigating to work out how to get something running on the device but there is a fairly active community on the mailing list which was a huge help. Once I got debian installed and working I was able to use the familiar linux tools to set everything up to my liking. I wanted to run a speed test on the device but I wasn’t able to find a fair way to do it. I network mounted the device via SSH and I was getting 4MB/s over the local network but multiple posts online have pointed out that SSH is inefficient for large data transfers. I was not able to find a faster way to network mount that maintained the security of SSH.

Overall I think the hardware is designed right and once you get it installed and set up its really quite easy to manage. Actually getting it to that point took a while but this can all be fixed later via documentation improvements.