The Kurobox HG
From CafeWiki
Back when I was looking for my first NAS, I had a few requirements floating around in my consciousness and the most important ones looked something like this:
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Configurable/customizable
- Came bare, install your own drive
Unfortunately, there were very few options in existence that could do those things above, in the late 2005 time frame when I started looking. Then I came across the Kuro Box "or expert box" which fit my requirements to a glove but added one more benefit, it would cause me spend countless hour learning about a linux distribution that I had previously only heard of but knew nothing about (Gentoo).
At the time I purchased my Kurobox, it came in two versions with the primary differences as follows:
- Kurobox: 200Mhz PPC with 100Mbit ethernet
- Kurobox HG: 266Mhz PPC with GigE
I ordered the Kurobox HG and eagerly awaited my package, which arrived a short time later with instructions entirely in Japanese. They don't call it Kuro for nothing.
The Kurobox HG is based on the same hardware as the Buffalo Linkstation HG, only without the hard drive. If you are interested in delving further into the Kurobox family of hardware, check out The Wikipedia Page. After spending hours on Kurobox forums, reading howto's and attempting a few, it appeared to me that the Gentoo distribution was most suitable for this NAS. The reason I came to this conclusion was as follows:
- Since the packages you select for Gentoo are compiled at installation time, PPC compatibility was as good as anything else out there.
- By compiling your own packages, you only install what you need and it is optimized for your configuration. This helps make the most out of limited resources.
- It appeared to me that the majority of the users out there were going the Gentoo route, so it offered me the largest support base in case I would need to ask questions.
--Sean 23:30, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
