Philip

I recently picked up a 500 GB WD My Book World Edition from OfficeWorks on an impulse buy to start stashing away some extra files. Unfortunately, the thing is abysmally slow at about 5 MiB/sec transfer rates so I guess it’s relegated to being on the network switch to get 2 MiB/sec feeds from my laptop over wireless. However, the good news is that all is not lost - the WD comes with an Oxford OXE800 chip which is a NAS SOC with support on-chip for a ARM 926 200 mHz CPU, 3 USB ports, 10/100 MBPS Ethernet, network co-processor, PCI, serial, SATA and AES-128 encryption. The WD board also includes a VIA 6122 Gigabit Ethernet chipset (not that it reaches that), strange given the Oxford SOC already has it built in.

Using some searching, I quickly managed to access the GNU/Linux on-board so basically I’ve got a 200 mHz ARM CPU that consumes about 14 Watts (about 6c a day) in power for web serving, FTP, BitTorrent or whatever else strikes my fancy. WD even kindly left the gcc compilers and toolchain on the box, so I don’t even have to head out to build one! Talk about nifty. I’ll have to see about speeding it up however, I’d like to get about 10+ MiB/sec from a direct connect Gigabit connection if possible, looks like the DMA and network co-processing isn’t up to scratch by the looks of things. If still no joy, maybe a direct USB 2 to SATA adaptor will do the job, but be nice to be able to use the externally available USB port for that.

Anyhow, check out all the stuff you can do at the wiki here.