After my efforts to add network attached storage to my Asus router failed (well, it did work, but only with USB 1.1 speed) I started looking for a flexible solution to attach a large hard drive to my network.

After looking at some strange IDE NAS drive enclosures on eBay, I came across the Addonics NAS Adapter - a small network dongle that provides the missing link between ethernet and USB. The feature list on the website was perfect, as the unit supports both SMB ("Samba" = Windows networking) and FTP and on top of that has a build in Bit Torrent client. For $55 the price was right and I ordered the adapter from ShopAddonics.com.

I have been using the NAS Adapter for a week now and I am quite impressed. I am using the unit with a 500GB Hitachi SATA drive in an USB 2.0 enclosure and the adapter recognizes and uses the hard drive flawlessly. Over SMB I get speeds around 8MB/sec when using Ethernet and around 2MB/sec over Wifi, which is in line with the expected speed for those networks. The NAS adapter runs smoothly even under heavy load (4 torrents, uploading to the HDD via wifi and streaming a video off the drive at he same time is no problem). The unit is entirely controlled via a web interface and can act both as a DHCP client or server. Both SMB and FTP allow multiple users and access levels.

The build in bit torrent client is reasonably fast and can handle up to 4 downloads simultaneously. Performance is quite solid and the unit is capable to resume downloads after a reboot (even though the manual claims differently).



Overall I am quite impressed with this small device and was curious to find out what's ticking on the inside. Unfortunately, the casing had no visible way of opening it and I didn't want to break the small device, so I did some Internet research.

What I found:

This device is an OEM product, meaning that Addonics only does QA control, but did not develop this unit. The 'official' part number seems to be WANSER-R. I was not able to find the actual manufacturer, but on the inside seems to be a RDC R3210 system on a chip. the R3210 is a 32bit RISC processor, running at 133Mhz. It has buildin ethernet and USB, plus dual DMA controllers, making it quite fitting for the job.

You can find the specs sheet of the R3210 in PDF here.

My Addonics NAS Adapter came with firmware 1.33c, which was stable but I found a 1.42b update on the this site (look for WANSER-R). Make sure you read the included readme. The 1.42b appears to be solid as well and I've noticed an increase in BitTorrent performance. Unfortunately, Addonics has not made any of the recent firmware updates available through their site. The unit appears to be linux based and there is an OpenWRT build for the R3210, but I did not make any attempt at flashing this unit with 3rd party firmware.