Sounds more like a bad Network Board on the device than a bad HDD. Just return it for a replacement.

I just tried a 3rd hard drive. This time it did not create the default '0' share so I was hopeful. I copied some files and got suspicious when the transfer was almost instantaneous. The files show up correctly but when I open a file (PDF) Acrobat tells me the file is corrupted.

Back it goes.

EWiz.com gave me an RMA number. Bummer that it now costs $12 to send this $60 product back. USPS of course -loves- it :) I hope they can at least reproduce the issue and send me a new unit. Ok, then I hope the new unit works correctly :)

Howdy,

I have three of them here, bought over a 6 week period, and THEY ALL FAIL, on the network side.

The test is simple, copy a dozen Zipped or Rared files over the network.

Run either WinZip or WinRar and verify the file. Out of a dozen files you will always get a failure.

Copy the failed file back locally and do a compare and yep, it's hosed for good.

The sad thing, I contacted Vantec Tech Support, stepped them thru the test, and they said they would call back.....

Yeah, right !!!! Three weeks, no call !!! That's what burns me.

Buyer Beware !!!!!

Thanks Dennis for your comment. Well ewiz.com received my LX last Tuesday and I haven't heard. I called today and spoke to a nice gentleman in the RMA department. All he could see was that they were going to replace the unit but not that it had been processed. So it will take a while before I get this box back. And now it seems it won't even work.

Guys, I just bought this drive enclosure (Oct 22). Tried using an old 10gb HDD (Quantum Fireball LM) so far it's working fine. Tried what Sander did. Copied an executable (.msi is it the same? Or do I have to transfer .exe ?) and it worked!

Transferred a couple of files in .rar and extract it (within the drive itself) it worked.

Create a couple directory for sharing (no password) and a couple with password. All worked fine

Anyway here's my NAS firmware: NAS-BASIC44, LOADER 068,vantec,2006-6-14. Everything I mentioned above was done under NAS.

If you guys want me to test something else let me know.

Thanks Dave, that is encouraging. I should be getting my replacement unit this week. Of course I'll post an update here.

I got a replacement unit from ewiz.com a few days ago. It has been working pretty well since. One time it had to be restarted as it could not be woken up. Since then it has woken up just fine after having been asleep overnight.

I actually intend to make part of my network shut down at night so that it doesn't use power at night and runs 'fresh' during the day. My Belkin Pre-N router needs a daily kick in the pants to keep the wireless working correctly (junk). Having it restarted daily should help.

I'm hoping I can trade mine on for something else, because it is a heaping pile of carp. I tried for 3 hours and 2 calls to support to get it up and running with my drive. Nothing, nothing through the network and nothing through the USB. Probably some failed part, there were loose connections everywhere and the led IC touches the side of the drive (if I had pushed it in where it belonged.)

I'm almost glad I didn't get it working since it probably would have corrupted my files anyway.

I made the mistake of buying it without checking real reviews first since it looked like my Mac mini. This thing is like a transvestite at the prom. Looks are very deceiving.

Just got one. Have spent 1 hour attempting to install the hard-drive & have the LEDs work at the same time. Some design idiot has routed the LED wire under the heatsink which puts pressure on the (very loose) front LED connector. So you can have the drive attached to the heat sink with no LEDS or not attached with some. But not both. All for the want of an extra 5mm of cable. Now I have my LED wire running around the front having dismantled the heat sink but the wire are frayed from where the heat sink had been screwed down on top of them. Idiots. So far (5 mins & counting) seems to work OK though. Stupid stupid design flaw has really annoyed me.

USB works perfectly.
Via ethernet, I can only get user/password being asked intermittently. However, after putting in the u/p, I constantly get "page cannot be displayed". I can't load up the web interface at all.
- Pinging the unit responds fine
- I've tried a hard reset
- I've seen the web interface just ONCE, but when I clicked on something, same error occurs.

I'm currently away, so can't get it replaced! Grrrr....

Any other ideas?

I have mine since september and also have files corruption problem. I do not know what to do but it is the last time
i buy a vantec box.

I also have a NexStar LX NAs unit. In fact it's my second one, because the first one corrupted my files too. The first thing I did when setting up the first unit was to upgrade the firmware to BASIC46, (BASIC44 was factory installed). USB copy of files worked fine. After connecting the unit to the network things seems to go downhill from there. After copying all my files from another USB disk to the NAS, I slowly discovered that the copied files on the NAS weren't opening correctly. After investigating some more, I installed a MD5 checksum utility to verify the integrity of the destination files (winMD5sum or Hashtab will do the trick). I confirmed that binary files such as exe's, zip's, jpg's, msi's all returned a different MD5 checksum when copied to the NAS, proving that the files were corrupted.

I returned the first unit to the store in exchange for another. This time I intentionally left the firmware at factory default (BASIC44). Copied all my files once again via USB for speed's sake. After all files were copied, connected it to the network and went away testing a multitude of files for MD5 checksums. I've had the second unit for about 5 days now and all MD5 checksums are matching when copying files via the network. So I'm at least pleased about that. I do, however, wish to satisfy my curiosity and upgrade the firmware to BASIC46 to prove/disprove whether the BASIC46 firmware is the culprit or if it something else. The HD I'm using is a Seagate 200Gb 7200rpm.

With the above being said, there is another thing that is bothering me. I'm testing the FTP functionality at the moment and have discovered that I'm not able to upload files to the unit when I'm outside the network (ie: from the internet). I'm pretty sure I've configured port forwarding correctly on my router, as connecting the FTP instance is working for both anonymous and R/W users, downloading files is working for both anonymous and R/W user.

It would be good to hear from anyone else that has similar issues. Also, it would be great if Vantec acknowledges this as a problem.

Thanks everyone for your continued comments on this promising but disappointing device. I've used mine for a while now and I've gotten to know the limitations. I set my activity timeout to 10 minutes to save power and because the drive I use is rather noisy. For some reason it takes about half a minute or so before the drive wakes up when I try to access it. I have it mapped to the same drive letters on all my PCs. I've also been unable to store the password for the drives. When I reboot my system I have to sometimes re-enter the password. Odd. I haven't really investigated this yet. Perhaps it's because I use \\storage instead of its IP address. Something to try.

Sander,

For the password issue on mapped drives, the same thing happens with me. I doubt you'll be able to get around it using the 'Map network drive' function of Windows Explorer. This is because the unit does not know how to handle the username... if on the other hand you had a real Windows server and mapping to it, it would remember the credentials.

Your option is to remove the mappings from Windows Explorer and create a batch script with the 'net use' command to map the drive with the credentials, and create a shortcut to the batch file in your Startup directory. This way your drives will be mapped every time you log in.

Ed,

somehow the password is now remembered properly on XP Pro. Perhaps because I used the IP address instead of \\storage. The goal of using the IP address was to try to speed up the 'wake up' process. This doesn't seem to have any effect. It still takes quite a while for the sleeping drive to wake up. The biggest drawback is that if you save downloaded files to this drive using Firefox it will attempt to open that folder when FF starts. This also happens when you click a link in your mail program (Thunderbird or Outlook in my case). Very annoying. The whole point of this shared drive was to store downloads only 1 time and use them throughout my LAN. I suppose we can't expect too much for a $70 product. It is pretty amazing they can run Linux on such a tiny board.

I have XP Pro as well, and everytime I restart I get the systray bubble appear saying 'cannot connect to network drive'. It's not that big a deal for me right now. I also have set my NAS to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, and when attempting to save/open/browse on the NAS it takes 5-10 seconds to 'open', so for your situation it might be the older drive hardware. Like you said, I guess that's the drawback of going on the cheap and getting this particular unit. Overall I'm happy with this unit, however the biggest gripe I have is the inability to format the disk using NTFS.

I have one of these and have had nothing but problems - on the NAS side the only thing that I've discovered (with other NAS products as well) is that its a good idea to give it a static IP on your router.

When I find a HDD that works with this unit I'll be able to confirm this.

After doing a lot of googeling I finally found someone writing something sensible about this device ... I have had it up and running for a while, and since migrating to Vista Home Premium its been working fine... Mapping it as a network drive (Z: in my case) works fine, and adding PW and login is fine aswell.

However my major problem seems that it disconnects randomly. I dont know if its because of my router (Netgear) or something else, but it will all of a sudden disconnect during transfer, and I have to turn it on and off to make it work...

Any tips ?

sounds like a piece of crap. is it possible to format a new harddrive in this enclosure.

a

hello: Yes, it's possible to format a new drive.
sizetwo: I've had to reboot it a couple of times but nothing like what you're describing. Try assigning a permanent IP address to the box in your router and then mount your drive using that IP address rather than \\storage. Perhaps that's the issue. Let us know.

The hanging problems reported here and other places (http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/21/vantec-netstar-lxgone/) appear to be the result of overheating of the CPU in the LX.

Transferring multiple gigabytes through a wireless link (no more than 54Mbps) to the box causes the it to hang about fifteen minutes into the process.

Artificially slowing the transfer rate by simultaneously playing out audio files from the box while coping data to the drive delays the failure significantly (completely?).

I guess I could go buy a Vantec CPU cooler contraption and make it fit with a Dremel. It's a lot easier to return it, though.

This enclosure is a piece of crap. First one I bought, the NAS feature became unresponsive randomly, so I thought I was unlucky and got a lemon. Went to the retailer and asked for an exchange (which they were reluctant to do in the first place).

The replacement showed the same problem of random freezing; and now I'm getting corrupted files through NAS. To make the problem worse, these corrupted files can't be deleted by any means, and is hogging up 20GB of space.

USB works fine; but if I just wanted a USB enclosure, I could've paid 1/3 the price.

WOW! I really should have looked here first! Even before trying this crap, I tried the COOLMAX (exact duplicate)one... SAME DAMN Crap! Hangs, Freezes, corrups.

I really hope No one buys this HW. I think I will Go with Maxtor 260$ :(

Haven't had the corruption problems with this box (yet?) but have had plenty of trouble with it going to sleep and then failing to wake up. So it's down the stairs and into the cabinet and a manual power off-power on... upon which it works for a time more before it goes into another coma.

At least I've found out from this forum why the panel lights have never worked.

This gizmo is not ready for prime-time, I'm afraid...

Had all kinds of problems with it. corrupted file. would stop altogether after few GB of transfer via wired network. now simply "bricked".
oh well, hopefully I can recover the files inside the harddrive.
got it on sales for around $50, thought I got a good deal, but oh well...
:X

I have news for everyone out there. Don't bother with this device. If you do, you're just asking for trouble. First, the FAT32 file system this device supports is notoriously bad when it comes to robustness of the filesystem. Second, you're just asking to lose your files if you use it.

For the person who reported problems using a small 8 GB drive in the chassis, I can confirm that. Only when I installed a larger 80 GB disk this the device begin to appear somewhat more functional. I say "somewhat functional" because this thing has never worked. Definitely not via network.

To the person who said that he has had problems with this device, but that he didn't expect much from a $70 device. Allow me to say this. If I knew how much trouble this device would be, I would rather that someone have told me to just flush $70 down the drain and avoid this product altogether. Why? If I value my time based on my hourly salary, I can assure you that the total cost of buying this device has run me into several hundred dollars, and that's in addition to the $7o I paid for the device.

I do expect things to work, regardless of the price. If it takes $150 to produce a workable device, then make it so. I'd rather be doing other things with my time than try making a crappy piece of $70 hardware work. It should just work.

Well, add another disappointed purchaser.
I've had it (Vantec NAS LX) two days now.
Upgraded to basic46 software.
I've been doing some pretty extensive testing with it. I was not expecting a fast NAS solution, but just one that worked! My plan was to use it as my lan-based archive for music files from which I'd be able to mount it on a couple servers and stream to my Roku media players.
I put a Maxtor 250G in the enclosure. Formatted it using the resident NAS utility. And then proceeded to do some testing as both a NAS and USB device.

I've was cautious not trusting any non-recoverable data to it .. thank goodness. As a NAS, I've tried using file/directory sync utilities (used 3 different ones), some as a mounted drive, some using it as an FTP server. I've transfered about 10000 files over the last couple of days.
Using it as NAS (configured sleep at 10 min) I have experienced:
-random timeouts
-file corruption on large files
-so far I've not detected corruption on any of the small files (less than 100M
-as a read-only device, it may work out. I've seen a LOT less timeout issues .. if I'm pulling MP3s from it. It's when you do a lot of writes (like trying to sync a 100G directory) that it seems to give up.

As a USB connected enclosure, no complaints.
Quick and everything seems to be OK so far... but like the others here have said, I could have got a USB-only enclosure for a lot less :-(

My recommendation .. take a pass on this one if its a reliable NAS solution you're looking for.

I had exactly the same problem - it corrupted files constantly when attached to the network. I finally attached it to a desktop via USB and shared it that way and it works fine that way. I can't be bothered returning it, though. I just won't be buying anything else from Vantec from now on!

I just bought a NST-375LX NAS with an embedded Samsung 400GB drive.

After reading all your comments, I am a bit scared because, like you I have problems.
USB: no pbs - 50GB of data transfer was quick
Network: I can change the name via the web interface, the disk is recognized on my network...but then impossible to see the different folders.

Then I go to the SMB server page. and then, impossible to create a folder or to share a folder. the windows then pops up "Action Failed! Error input Data"... so I am bit stuck.

PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAZ, your problem is using a 400 GB drive in a device that only supports fat32. Fat32 can't handle 400GB, unless you partition the drive down to a more compatible size.

And I haven't even begun to address the corruption issues.

I've just bought this VANTEC NAS yesterday and tried to setup the network. I have a Seagate 80GB HDD. When I tried to create a folder in the SMB server interface, I also got the "Action failed! Error input Data" message. So I went to create a FTP account instead and created a folder there. When I went back to SMB server interface, I was then able to create folders and share it. I don't have a clue why it works this way for me, but you can try it, see if it works for you too.

I've been using mine for a week now, and have seen NONE of the problems listed in this forum. FTP works fine, and no file corruption and files of ANY size. SMB is working perfect as well, no file corruption anywhere on any file sizes. So I am not sure what is going on with the rest of your units here.

Although tested, I do not use SMB at all anymore since I do not use Windows networking for anything. I have
all the services in windows disabled, etc. I like my system to be pretty tight. What I have done is used
something called "NetDrive" from Novell, which installs a service that allows you to map local drive letters
to FTP servers. Works awesome.

The only thing that I cannot figure out at this point is why I cannot access my LX from outside my router.
It just hangs there with no response and then the connection times out. I have it running behind my Linksys router with a static internal IP address, and I have my router configured to allow port 21 to come in from the outside.

Upon testing from the outside, the lan activity light on the LX flashes so the connection IS coming through,
but then it just times out and the login prompt never comes up. However if I FTP to the LS from inside my network it works just fine.

Im not sure if this is something related to the LX or my POS Linksys router which has pissed me off with other issues that it has "by design", such as, you cannot forward port 443 from WAN to LAN - whata POS. So at this point in time, I am thinking it could be my router. I am going to try it from behind my DLink router and see if the same thing happens. If so, then its definitely something to do with the LX and the way it handles routed packets.

I will definitely return it at this point if that is the case. But as of current, I am having no major problems with it. Works awesome.

Huh,

I use my two NAS drives for everything:

1) FTP from outside my network works nice, I use it quite often.

2) Never corupts my files, I use 2 of these things, one for my software and one for my media files and system backups. I am cheap so I use second copy to copy the files to another USB enclosure that I have mounted through my Airport Extreme. I use zip, rar, iso, you name it without any issues.

3) I use SMB just fine but SMB by nature is crap. The Fat 32 filing system and poor security are tradmarks of SMB / Microsoft I think. Windows XP Home blows through the passwords, so anyone can hack it. Windows XP Pro will require you to authenticate (it provides the user name IP\Guest!!!)and remembers your password until reboot. Windows Vista makes you remove the "\\" when providing the password, hey but who said Microsoft was consistant.

The major problem i am having is that I can not connect my Neuros OSD to these things. My OSD runs Linux and works fine with my other Linux servers and windows shares, but not this NAS. I think SAMBA likes CIFS versus SMB. I know some people say it is the same others disagree. I still have to do some research, but dont do it on Vantec's page, their content is useless.

-Dan

I had tried to format the harddrive connecting using usb cable to my computer then put it on the network, which took hours. When it was on the network the volume that I named it as didn't show and showed as the factory default volume name and every action gave "action failed! error input data!" and then for hack of it, i formatted the drive again using the network nexstar disk utility. Which then it started to work, which just wasn't cool. But now it seems to work just fine. I haven't tried to connect to my computer using usb again to see if all file structure is there and not corrupted. Good luck all.

I have just finished setting up this unit as NAS. So far it seems to be working fine. Had a few problems setting it up with a 500 gig seagate. Not sure why Vantec make you use Fat32. Finally found a solution that allowed me to use full drive under Fat32. Did get one hang during a long transfer of files. Shut off sleep function and have been tranferring for six hours so far without a hangup. Files are mostly mp3s which seem ok, but haven't tried all of them. Initally had a bit of a problem getting to web page because my workgroup wasn't called workgroup, but network magic got me into setup nicely, then changed workgroup name and mapped a drive in XP. So far so good.

very nice

hi there

i have 2 of this nas device, and for the only problem is that several files that are stored are edited by more than one person, and if someone tries to open an file when it is already apened by someone else, it doesn't warn about it. it is very anoying, because several people already loosed information.

Thanks to this blog I was finally able to get my Nexstar NAS working. The most important thing that isn't that clear in the documentation that comes with this unit is that the drive MUST be FAT32 formatted. The spare 160GB drive I was installing had already been NFTS formatted and there was no way it would work. So after finding and reading this blog, I figured it out, installed the drive in my computer, changed the format using an old copy of Partition Magic I had (which allowed me to format it as one partition) reinstalled the drive in the NAS and lo and behold the disk was recognized. Then, when I tried to create a new directory under SMB server I got an error response. So I used the Nexstar Disk Utility to format the drive and that changed the name of the disk to PUBLIC. Then I was able to create my directories. I notice that the documentation does say under the Format Disk section that when the drive is formatted using the disk utility it will be formatted with the FAT32 file system. One of the things I had tried was to format the NTFS disk, but I got an error response and nothing happened. So as far as I can tell, the disk must be formatted in FAT32 when it's installed in the NAS unit.

I bought one in Sept 07, set it up on my network. I wanted to use it for network backup. I have run a few test and the performance is acceptable for my purposes.

I I tried it out today (Jan,08, about 4 months later). well it powers up but I cannot connect to it at all. I have reset it several times but it is unresponsive. I am a PC/network technician so I kinda know what I am doing.

I actually bought this thing hoping to use it at a customers location for local nework backup. I should have read a few reviews first. I don't know what the warranty is on this thing. I paid about $75 for it.

Just in case anyone's still ending up at this page I thought I'd write a brief update. I've given up on the Vantec as a viable NAS box. I tried sticking a larger drive in and that caused all kinds of issues. Instead I bought an HP MV2010. It was a refurb unit from buy.com. They are still for sale there, $160 now I think. The MV is much much nicer but still a bit problematic. When I was copying large numbers of files to the device during initialization it would frequently loose net connectivity and probably rebooted. This was especially bad with SyncToy and JFileSync. I guess this samba implementation really doesn't like sync tools. For general use (storing photos, file downloads, home directory etc.) the MV2010 is quite suitable.

I got this thing last night, with the express purpose of using it as a NAS on my network. I've got the IP assigned from my Linsys router dynamically, and I'll try setting the ip physically to see if it helps. The FAT32 thing is a real pain, but I got over it. I put a 160MB drive in there, and the device and share appeared as soon as I reformatted the drive. I have not even gotten to the ftp or sleep mode yet, and I'm seeing all sorts of performance problems.

The main thing is that I have been having problems is that it locks my Windows XP Home and Professional computers for up to 2-3 minutes at a time. The network and hard drive lights will start blinking furiously, and then suddenly my computer freezes. After about 2-3 minutes of this, things begin to work again, but it will only come back. I've worked on this all day today, and I'm getting tired of it. If I don't get a solution by tonight, it's going back.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Bought the Nexstar LX about three months ago. All functions including network were working fine until recently when all functionality stopped. When switched on the LED lights up, but the fan, despite being set to "manual high", is off and no power to HD either...

I purchased the Nexstar LX the other night at FRYs for 50 bones... Having recently purchased a new XPS desktop with a TB of storage, I needed to be able to access one of the slave drives on my old gaming pc for family photos, videos, etc that I had on stored on that machine.

I have it connected to a linksys wireless router, via the ethernet cable. So far... So good! I can not really complain... One issue I noticed off the bat was the 250gb drive had 2 partitions on it... This device seems to only see one. Thankfully not the gaming partition I installed all my games too, but the storage partition I set up for storage.

I have not tried the FTP, or USB capability. It seems to serve the purpose it was intended for until I can move that data to my new PC.

You could also try to set up some SCSI drivers, but that could prove difficult if you do not have the experience. If more hard drives are used, SCSI drivers and specific hardware can speep up the whole process.

i have 2 of this nas device, and for the only problem is that several files that are stored are edited by more than one person, and if someone tries to open an file when it is already apened by someone else, it doesn't warn about it. it is very anoying, because several people already loosed information.