Deprecated FON Boards !

I posted these requests for a couple of years on your forum. But here they are again:

1. Could you create a ne special type of 3.5" USB hard drive enclosure which when plugged using a USB hub to the Fonera 2.0 will provide amazing new type of power saving functionality. Basically the hard drive's complete index content should be hosted on the Fonera 2.0 hile the hard drive should be turned completely off all the time. The hard drive would only turn on safely only when there is a request to access some files on it.

2. You could thus sell such new type of special 3.5" SATA hard drive enclosures it could even be a 4-drive bay. Your price could be really low, like $20 for 1-drive and $60 for a 4-drive bay. You can sell that as an accessory for the Fonera 2.0. Nobody on the market has this.

3. Again, this suggestion is not for a standard hard drive bay. It needs to turn the hard drive off and host the index of the hard drive content on the Fonera 2. And Fonera 2 only turns on the hard drive when people are accessing the index for example. Corruption of hard drive contents should be impossible.

That solution would be the worlds best NAS, home file server, Torrent storage and auto-downloader system in the world. It would be the cheapest and use the least amount of power since the hard drives can be kept off power for 99.9% of the time for most normal people's usage. Since people only occasionally access their own personal storage.

Next step, wait for it, is a synch system with Google Gdrive service that is coming up. People will synchronize their home backups with Google Gdrive cloud storage.

Automatic RSS Torrent downloads, when bandwidth is available (it could be calculated to do those downloads while the user is sleeping), with automatic unseed after share ratio 1:1 is reached. Automatic synchronizing of auto-downloaded and on-demand downloaded torrents with Archos portable video player. Basically when it detects that external storage is connected, it should copy all the latest podcasts, video podcasts and on-demand downloaded files to folders on that portable multimedia player.

Huh? I don't see what's the real difference between what you propose and spinning down the disk on inactivity like some enclosures do already (like WD passport) or using the excelent scsi-idle as described below, which works with a lot of (already existing) enclosures.

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/Spi ... BHarddisks

Keep in mind we're talking about a device from 2004.

Sure, there is a small difference between "completely off" and spinned down (there are multiple modes of this actually) but in the end the difference is minimal, maybe 1-2W at most (which would be probably wasted in the smarter enclosure anyway). And of course you get no noise, no heat and no mechanical wear in either mode. I bet we can save 1W if we design a slightly more efficient wallwart but who cares, we're speaking about 1-2$/year. Your desktop PC when is turned off takes 5 times that if you don't have a "real" power switch to kill it completely.

The idea here is to provide for example a $60 4-bay USB 3.5" SATA accessory which would take care of any 4 SATA drives by turning them off completely and hosting the complete Index of each of those on the Fonera 2.0 or on any low power USB flash drive memory expansion connected to that USB hub coming out of the Fonera 2.0.

Those spindown and such special drives aren't common nor easy to use solutions as far as I know. As far as I know running USB hard drives 24/7 is a waste of energy and a waste of money. Also it is terrible in terms of heating of the hard drive which harms its life expectancy considerably.

We need a cheap way to host for example 16 SATA hard drives on your Fonera 2.0 in your home, have all that synchronize with Google Gdrive and use absolutely the minimal amount of power only according to local or remote access requests to the specific files on the specific hard drives.

None of the usual USB hard drive or NAS hard drive enclosures that I know work in this way. Also they are not optimized for switching the power off completely when not in use to have them there standby 24/7 for you to access locally or remotely over the Internet.

Another possibillity would be to design a USB controlled multiple power extender cord adaptor. Where each electricit plug has a number to which you have to plug each specific USB hard drive. This way the USB controlled multi-power adaptor can cut off power to a USB hard drive on-demand according to the software in the Fonera 2.0. But I think it would be best to design new optimized USB hard drive enclosures, and have them be compatible all the way, including handling of read/write to several NTFS formatted hard drives. And have them all safely disconnect so you never experience any file transfer corruption which can damage the hard drives if power is disconnected during a file transfer.

* I wouldn't risk this on a fonera 2 personally
as soon as it runs out of memory it will reboot... and thus damage your filestructure...
if you "reset" your fonera2 you will have liquidated your "File Allocation Table" of your 16 sata discs
Due to NAT/IPT you can only get 1,9mbit out of your f2...
so yes you have "storage"... but it's at speeds of <10mbit ... so I hope you have some years...to get your 16 terabyte cluster filled

Also by spinning down/up your harddisk...it will wear out!
I run a BBS since 1992... and harddisks allmost never failed... untill you had a power shutdown in the house...suddenly these discs refuse to spin up again...
there is even a "counter" inside each harddisc to tell you how many times it spinned up... how many time it has been running.... (and bad sectors )

you can better buy a nice 4 port usb powered power outlet ; and switch down the harddiscs when not needed (during the night? during the day)... only keep 1 running where you have your torrent running... or use a 16gbyte usb stick for that

DIY : http://www.instructables.com/id/A_USB_P ... Isolation/
Finished product : http://www.graficall.nl/Product~id~8105 ... Strip.aspx
The latter is supported by FON : https://dev.openwrt.org/browser/package ... ?rev=10915

Below 10mbit/s is good enough for streaming of any type of videos that most people would store on those multiple Terrabytes of SATA hard drives. 10mbit/s is probably also enough for most BitTorrent download and upload speeds and most people cannot upload more than 10mbit/s out to the Internet anyways.

If you want a cluster of 16 Terrabyte drives on your Fonera 2.0, I am not necessailly suggesting that you transfer the files through the Fonera 2.0, you'd have copied the files directly from a computer on NTFS formatted hard drives. Or just copied the hard drives for other hard drives. That's how most people fill up terrabyte hard drives.

I am not suggesting that the unique filestructure index is hosted on the Fonera 2 or on a USB stick connected to the Fonera 2, I am suggesting that a copy of the whole hard drive index be there. So if you for example browse on the file structure of a Samba/Upnp share locally, or if you browse on a HTTP or FTP interface remotely, then the root and so forth file structure can be pulled from the Fonera 2.0 all the while that the specific hard drive can slowly turn on and be ready for that file access, if that might take 5 seconds or so. This way it feels exactly like if the hard drive was always turned on. Since most people have to browse around contents a bit before choosing which file to start streaming. When you are finished accessing the file, when you exit the HTTP interface or log-off the FTP session, or when the Samba/Upnp process idles, then the hard drive can be switched off safely until the next time that it needs to be accessed.

I think that my 16 terrabyte scenario doesn't have to be so ridiculous. Terrabyte drives are now below $100, more and more people have hundreds and thousands of DivX files in their personal collections, more and more people have tens and hundreds of GB for their Mp3 music collections. And more and more people enjoy storing tens and hundreds of hours of personal HD home video footage (mine is 9mbit/s and below so still could be within bandwidth rate of the first Fonera 2 processor) and cloud computing services can be used to automatically compress high bitrate HD videos to smaller files that are easier to manage on the Fonera 2 and thus especiall easier to manage on the Internet, using for example on Youtube in HD which uses 2mbit/s and Facebook using 2.5mbit/s, those are well below bitrate supported by the Fonera 2.

How isn't a common and easy to use solution? Take any modern Western Digital My Book for example (just because I like it and it is readily available for quite reasonable prices on Amazon) plug it to whatever NAS you have. You're done! And this isn't the only option of course, just one that works for sure. Don't tell me your dream Fon enclosures will become more "common" than a popular Western Digital enclosure (which isn't the only one that spins down by default)!

And even if you don't have such enclosure there are multiple things you can try. In my experience ALL enclosures I've tested work with sg_start. Get a binary version of it or install the proper package (yes, there's a binary for arm as well of course), use the script from the link I provided above and that's it.

If that doesn't work you still have many other options (again read the link I've provided).

But all this work applies only if you have already some old device you want to use. If you are in a market for a new one just take one that spins down by default, no need to wait on Fon to invent one!

Hard drive spin down means it spins it down to 5400rpm instead of 7200rpm to save a few % of power, perhaps only just like 40% or something? A 3.5" hard drive in spin down mode would still consume between 6 and 10 W when it runs idle wouldn't it? Compared to 20-30W when fully active.

I am suggesting that the Fonera 2 with new special enclosures use 0 W most of the time when not needed to be in use. And thus allows for up to dozens and dozens of hard drives dynamically available just as required and would be kept turned off most of the time since you would rarely if ever need to access the data on them.

you BUY a 5400 or 7200 or 10.000 Rpm disc
I don't think they allow for variable Rpm speed
even with special enclosures

but i'm certainly at row#1 when looking at jbod enclusures

but currently these are >200euro when you want a 4+ jbod enclosure

best is just a cheap midi tower (30 euro)
and a jbod esata pci raid card (100euro) with 1 esata cable

you could get mobo's running mobile cpu or even atom cpu which will not use soo much power

I understand your enthusiasm but no wonder you haven't heard about enclosures that work the way you want to because you haven't heard really much of anything. Spin down is spin down to zero, nothing, no noise, almost no power consumption, nothing. There are some drives that spin at variable (no variable as zero and 7200) speed but very very very few and this isn't what we're talking about.

And what 20-30W are you talking about?! Let's take for example a Samsung HD103UJ, a one TB drive from late 2007. It isn't green, it doesn't have variable speed, it was the cheapest at the time (but nothing particularly wrong with it). It has from 5W to under 10W power consumption even under full load. Spin down or sleep or whatever you want to call it is UNDER 1W. These are both specifications and measured figures.
Keep in mind we've had since then tons of Green, EcoGreen and such hard drives (which the Samsung wasn't) so you probably would do considerably better today.

There's only 1000 La Fonera 2.0s, and there likely won't be many more. It's a bit too soon to market an (undeveloped) accessory that attempts to turn this weak toy into a home NAS system.

plus DL schedule... simple choice for days of the week and hours (for example: someone would like his F2 to work in BT mode during the night when there are almost no people connecting to his/hers device)

I posted more of my idea on Martin Varsavsky's blog, including a quick sketch that I did of the idea of a way to power USB hard drives only when needed:

At CeBIT, I was looking for USB-controlled power plug duplicators. I’d like a $5 multi-plug power adaptor to connect to Fonera 2.0 using a USB connection to thus remote control power sent to certain powered USB accessories. For example turning on/off 12 USB hard drives. This could turn the Fonera 2.0 into the worlds cheapest and best NAS and server system. It should simply turn USB hard drives off 99% of the time when they are not needed, but as soon as the user remotely wants to access USB Hard drive content, or to transfer stuff to that USB hard drive such as Torrent download or automatic RSS Torrent downloads, then each hard drive is powered on. And is only powered off when it has been safely disconnected in software term so no file corruption should be possible.

Connecting 12 USB Hard drives to ones Fonera 2.0 is just a start, how about an unlimited times 12 hard drives just using an unlimited amount of USB hubs? The most important part is that all the hard drives are off most of the time and only turned on and powered when needed.

Here is a quick sketch of the functionality that I am looking for so that we can all save 99% on USB Hard Drive power consumption (in cases where we would like to have our USB hard drives connected and available through Fonera 2.0 at any time):



I’ve been pitching this idea for a while here, on Fon.com forum and elsewhere.

I'd like to see this USB Controlled Power Duplicator With USB Hub for USB Hard Drives sold as a special accessory for the Fonera 2.0 at something like $10 for a 6-port model. And they should work through a USB Hub, so you could potentially buy as many as you want and thus connect 60 USB hard drives to your Fonera 2.0 if you want.

Each port could have a number so eventually the Fonera 2.0 control panel might say something like "Please connect USB Hard Drive _name_ to port 3 on Power Duplicator _serial-number_ to restore access to following folders and files:"

you could investigate "hdidle"... eg it can run on the fonera2.0 and send idle command to the usb devices not in use.
every brand has now an "eco green" model which, in idle mode doesn't consume much.

Beware that every time you "spin down/up" your harddrive a counter is increasing;
at a certain time you will hear clicking noises...

it's been known that harddrives are more likely to fail when powering up/down very much;
while if they keep on powered up they can go for decades (untill there is an abrupt powerfailure or powerspike


on the other hand I was able to get my hands on Silvershield PowerManager aka SISPMCTL
but i got a "broken pipe" error when trying to get it working on Fonera 2's firmware;
unluckily no feedback from Fonosfera team...
When time permits i'm gonna try on Openwrt... it has been proven to be more reliable than fon-ng firmware (dixit discussions on getting Bluetooth working)

if you want to create your own device:
http://www.obdev.at/products/avrusb/powerswitch.html

best is to perform a "umount" before powering down offcoarse
also starting the 12 usb devices at once can be a power drain???

I don't think fon should be reselling this;
any reseller can create his own plugin (for free) and then resell his special usb/switch/hub ...

don't forget La Fonera 2 is the slowest NAS in existence...

on an NSLU2 there is no firewall/natting which gives upto 100mbps speeds
(source : http://1wt.eu/articles/nslu2/) (it has 2 usb2 ports)

I'm allready happy if I have 600kbps/s on my Fonera2.... (even when using ext2 ...ntfs is only readonly and much slower (CPU!))

I hope you won't be filling 12 x 1,5terabyte disks by usb2/fonera... you could take a lifetime getting'm filled
also currently it only allows a 1 concurrent usersession on samba/ftp...
i hope you don't have a girlfriend with a computer... she might be asking when you go to sleep so she can access her files as well .... do some timesharing.... it's like an iPhone (only 1 application can have the cpu)

All that is needed is enough bitrate to stream videos, including HD videos. Thus 4-5mbit/s would even be fine to support HD resolution streaming such as mkv files on the local Samba or UPNP or DLNA server. To stream standard definition videos locally or worldwide using FTP, 1-2mbit/s would be fine.

The hard drives contents would mostly be populated using USB directly onto a PC/Laptop. They'd be constantly updated though using RSS and BitTorrent automatic and remotely activated downloads.

The killer application here is to have full access to several terrabytes of your personal files at home and from all over the Internet wherever you go, as long as your home upload connection is at least 1-2mbit/s you would then be able to stream any of your movies from all over the world on a device such as the Archos 5 playing back the streamed video file on the other side.

The key here is that this is for constant local and worldwide availability for streaming of all your personal files, thus a faster CPU in the server/NAS is not needed. I prefer FON optimize the price of the Fonera 2.0 and eventually sell it for 29€ or cheaper with more and more tons of crazy interesting applications.

My plan is to have at least 10 USB Hard Drives connected to my Fonera 2.0 at all times, thus my plan is to have upwards 10 Terrabytes of my personal video and audio files available for me locally in my home and remotely worldwide using personal and secure FTP/HTTP hosting and I expect millions of other people will want to have the same setup. Personal huge storage at home and on the cloud, that is absolutely the next big thing.

3.5" SATA USB Hard Drive enclosures are like $10, and more and more people have dozens of hard drives at home. And most of the data people store on so many hard drives are movies and music, thus perfect for streaming on local or worldwide personal server. Why not have all those hard drives connected as your NAS and personal worldwide FTP streaming server on the Fonera 2.0 instead of having all your old and newer hard drives just sit around your home collecting dust?

Yes installing mini upnpd or ushare is on my todo list
as long as you don't need to reencode/transcode...
The new Sony televisions (3rd generation engine) have ethernet & dlna support for video
but I can't see what it supports of video codecs

I'm currently looking at Emtec R700... it has an encoder&decoder for Divx; can record/timeshift video;
you can even add dvb-t stick to it (and support for wifi usb dongle as well)
it's also mips based... supports sata ; has hdmi ; realtek video chip

I filmed an interview with the Emtec 700 manufacturer at http://techvideoblog.com/cebit/mele-vid ... t-top-box/

I heard about some product called "Popcorn Hour", it might be a good media streamer.

But my favorite is the Archos 5 series with the DVR Station, it supports all codecs, now also DivX and WMV at up to 720p and outputs nicely using HDMI to a HDTV. And most importantly has WiFi and is pocketable to stream all your video and audio files remotely from your Fonera 2.0 over FTP/HTTP connection from any hotspot in the world. More informations about the Archos is at my other website at http://archosfans.com

Yes I have ordered a Popcorn Hour last week
it lacks 2 things though...
- it's no pvr (no recording of television shows)
- you can't tell it to play file X (a Control4 domotic specialist said a netgear mediatank was thus better)

My father in law has an Archos 605Wifi... the 4gbyte ssd version; he choose not to buy the web plugin;
I've been looking at DVR Gen6 stations... but they are at 70 euro+
I can almost have a new Archos 605wifi for that price
still 25euro for a web/flash plugin I believe?

he currently uses it for his postal card collection when on markets... to view which ones he doesn't have... the screen is bigger than a pda/iphone.... and still portable.... offcoze back then you didn't have "netbooks"

I currently have an eye for "Sony Q1" which can have a usb keyboard if necessary... and also has a 7inch touch screen...

personally I use http://www.orb.com on my htpc at home and visit it via any web enabled browser (eg my Nokia e70) which will search for any document/music/video/jpeg and play/reencode it to the resolution of my screen.... incl subtitles

the tv out of the Nokia MusicXpress5800 is also nice
offcoze no body takes along the necessary cable

You just need the Archos DVR Station Gen5 for the 605 WiFi, no need for the more expensive Gen6 DVR Station.

if shipping is cheap, you could get it from the USA for $44 http://www.ecost.com/detail.aspx?edp=41 ... u=41483977

And I believe there are cheap deals on such sites as Ebay below 30€ for it. Actually the DVR Station Gen4 for the 604, 704 is exactly the same as the one for the Gen5, the only difference being the new remote control with the thumb keyboard, but usually you can buy that separately on archos.com for 15€ or something like that.

problem with USA is the customs ...
Gen6 introduces HDMI connection to my LCD screen... currently I have to push 3 buttons to get to the composite channel (to get the upscaled hdtv resolutions)

in the archos shop I only find the "cradle" or something...
I keep an eye on ebay.... UK & France have sometimes an offer
but it's allways at +-100 euro (shipping included)...