While the WANSER-R was a great device, a recent upgrades to my storage space finally forced me to move away from FAT32 and in turn away from the WANSER-R.

As a replacement, I picked up the WLX-652 USB NAS from DealExtreme, my preferred Hong Kong seller. Equipped with two USB 2.0 ports and a build in BitTorrent client, plus support for NTFS and EXT2/3 it seemed like a good choice. A few weeks later the unit arrives and first impressions are good as well - the unit feels solid, is well made and seemed to initially work just fine.

However, after using the unit for a few days I quickly noticed some major drawbacks:

- Mounting of NTFS partitions is unreliable and access is quite slow
- The BitTorrent client requires all the units resources, making the SMB server unresponsive
- Worst Part: The unit would crash frequently, especially under high load.

After initially suspecting an overheating problem, I found out that the crashing issue seems to be fairly widespread with this units and even a firmware update did not resolve it. It seems to be a case of sloppy programing of the firmware.

Luckily, it turns out that this sloppy programing had some other side effects: It permits easy access to the units file system and in turn interested a group of users into hacking this device. The unit seems to be running on a Star 8132 system-on-a-chip, has 32MB memory and 4MB flash.

The result, the so called SNAKE OS Linux is not only stable, but has also been updated to contain the latest Transmission BT daemon, SSH support and an improved file system. I am currently running the SNAKE OS Beta 2r1 (and will soon be upgrading to the Beta 3) and I had up times of 10 days and more. You can find SNAKE OS firmware here:

DealExtreme NAS Google Group

Keep in mind that this firmware is beta and installing it may void your warranty, etc. I also want to mention that while this unit still supports NTFS, this support requires a lot of system resources and it is recommended that ext3 or ext2 is used instead, especially when using Transmission.

Update: DealExtreme started shipping a new version of this unit, marked as WLX 652R. The WLX 652R is NOT COMPATIBLE with the Smake OS!