It is quite hard to turn your average PC into something that runs Mac OS X and normally requires you have the right motherboard and other parts to make it even get to the install stage. What if you could make a USB stick that boots a safe version of OS X (no graphic or sound drivers) and generally works without wiping your present drives – great right? I shall document what I have done so far and what the outcome was in regards this amazing program – iPortable.

What is it?

The first thing you need to do is get your hands on it – if you search for iPortable, you should find a torrent – now you need a few things to get this to even work. The first thing you need is at least an 8 GIG memory stick, I have also used in the past a USB External Hard drive but that will be slower (and its not that quick as it is). The other requirement is some sort of working Mac, be it a real one, a Hackintosh or a Virtual machine. As it happens I had my Athlon machine running 10.5.8 with the slight annoyance that you must have the USB already plugged in for the machine to even see it.

Making the Bootable Stick

The guide (included) explains how you mount the file on the mac, format the memory stick and then use included CloneTools to write the image onto the memory stick. I had to use the boot fixer before my computer would allow this device to boot. Once this process is over, you now have a memory stick that as long as your computer can handle booting from USB sticks (Mine showed up as blank in the list which fooled me for a while) – you can boot into Mac OS X 10.6.2.

A Working Mac – just slowly

It takes a LONG time for the USB to boot and eventually get into OS X, just be patient at this part. Of course you do not want to be booking and running from USB for a main OS, this is now the process to get a harddrive ready for the same image. I used the same process as making the USB but instead picked the 250GIG harddrive I had as slave, this meant that when I started the computer I either had Windows 7 or if I pressed F8 and choose the secondary drive – OS X 10.6

Getting the parts working

As with any Hackintosh, getting the right files to make the things work is a fine art, I had a Creative Labs sound card fitted and a ATI 3650 Graphics card. The sound worked fine, I searched the forums and found the correct driver, ran it and rebooted and we had sound. Graphics was a different story though, I picked I think the wrong one and while the machine was working, I was stuck with a blue screen (the mouse moved though).

Worse then any of the above though, evn though the Hard drive was 250GIG, as far as the OS was concerned, it only had 64meg free. It was at this stage I had to so some googling to get the answer I needed. When I was booting from the memory stick, it picked the first Mac OS it had found and in this case was on the HD. I had to tell it at the boot prompt rd=disk2s1 and now we were from the memory stick. The reason for this – to run the hard drive repair tools on a drive that is not in use.

In Diskwarrior (Supplied) so far it has found 1929 Overlapping files and is still going. I am hoping by the end of this process I have the full free disk space otherwise its pointless.

Is it worth the effort?

I do this as something to do, If I wanted a mac that badly I would just go and buy one. It is good to see people faces when I boot a work computer with Mac OS X even if it is slow from USB. It is safe as you can try it out and it gives you a bootable OS for another Hackintosh should you need to sort it out.

I was hoping to do a full blown review after having my devices for 6 days now (It arrived Tuesday) but due to the capacity and time taken to get the device ready and put the data on there – this cannot be the case. Unlike a new graphics card or a new monitor, a NAS box is generally not something you get excited about, it’s storage after all but it does play a very important role in getting all your information in one place and be able to access it from the LAN.

The Pre-NAS Days

I think it is important to go over what I used to do before going for such a device. Like a lot of people (tech’s maybe?) I build up my collection of computers and wired them all up to a gigabit network for sheer speed. As I needed storage space, I would buy normally a cheap external USB Drive – whichever was on offer at the time which had the biggest capacity. In my case I had bought the iomega range, first the 50GIG model and later the 1TB model. I shared this out on the network but it involved the computer been on and of course USB Speeds are slower then say e-sata.

My problem came when my current collection got filled to the brim with files, do I buy some more drives? Do I delete maybe some of the files I do not need? Do I store them on other places across the network? I did not really want to waste more money on USB Drives so that is why I felt NAS was the Answer.

Building the NAS

It took me from 6pm Tuesday to 10:30pm on Thursday to get the drive ready before I could even start to put anything on there. My first course of action was to move the files from the USB Drives over the the correct shared drive. The NAS Box had set up some folders due to the services I clicked such as Audio, Video and so forth. The next issues was speed and to start off I had the NAS Box plugged into the router which only has 10/100 ports. Once I moved the NAS box across to my gigabit switch – I noticed a big difference in speed. At the end of each night, I stopped any file moving in progress and powered down all computers.

Finally it was ready

Now that I had all the files off the external USB Drives and the 1TB Drive fitted inside the Dell – this now allowed me to plug in all the drives into the NAS Box as well as fit the 1YB Drive into an external case I had to give me yet more space.

Of the Original RAID 1 formatted 2x2TB Drives – it came out with 3.57TB Free. We have the 1TB, 1TB, 500GIG and 320GIG Drives fitted to a USB Hub (as there is only 3 ports on this device) and these are shared as usbshare1 through to usbshare4. Now as all of the files are indeed stored on the NAS drive and I still have 1.88TB left, I do not really need to power the external drives on just yet but as you can see, it gives me extra space for now and the future.

Speed of the device

Connected to a gigabit network, the device shows up on the network share as the default name of DiskStation, this can changed on the device if needed of course. You map drives and in my case I used V: for Video, M: for music and P: for Pictures. I would suggest it is as quick as copying files to another machine, definitely a lot quicker then when I used the PogoPlug, but this is understandable. I do notice when starting iTunes or the background switcher that the NAS box will rattle the hard drives for a while before coming up.

The built in programs

The NAS Box has various services that allow you to share out your audio, video and music collection as well as download services and other bits. Now the beauty of the download service is that you can just add a program to your local machine, add a torrent or a NZB file and the box will sit in the background downloading  the file allowing you to switch off the machines around it.

The Photo album while handy I suppose is not something I can see myself using, I already have a gallery online and sharing files across an limited upload will not be a fast experience. I cannot for some reason to get the program to thumbnail all my pictures.

Sharing USB Printers

I tried this and on Windows 7 the printer came up as usbprinter and while the NAS box knew what the printer was, it had no idea on the driver for the features. In the end I have up on this method of sharing and plugged it back into my machine. Sahring via the network means no signs of ink been low and so forth.

Was it worth the money?

I could have bought 4x2TB Drives for the money I spent on this lot (I only bought 2 remember) and used a spare machine and had a total of 10TB worth of space on share (thats including the 2x1TB external drives). I can imagine the machine would have been a lot louder, this devices is very quiet indeed. 4 HD inside a machine and in use would have caused more heat and thus more noise. I do feel what I did buy was a good investment, yes I am limited to 4TB Internal but have the ability to add USB Drives as needed.

So you have a Pogoplug and you want some more functionality but you do not want to ‘brick’ it or loose the file sharing across the internet part? Well PlugApps is the answer for you on this one and for the people who thought this article was me ripping my pogoplug apart and adding hardware to it – sorry, not just yet people

Allowing SSH to work

If you head off to My Pogoplug page – click on settings (top menu bar) and then Security settings on the left pane. You show see a tick box in the middle with Enable SSH access for this Pogoplug enabled device – tick that and now we can get access to the device.

Using Putty if you are on Windows (the mac has ssh built in) and you now need to find your IP address of your Pogoplug. On my router it had a page which shows IP allocations and I noticed one that was blank, after trail and error I did manage to SSH in and we had lift off (command prompt in fact).

Installing the plugapps part

I followed THIS guide, I did use a 2GIG USB Stick to start off with but did swap (and repeat the process) for a 60GIG drive, I could then use the rest of the space to store files you see. This is a safe thing to do, if you unplug the drive and reboot the pogo plug, it reverts back to the stock firmware and boots as normal and be aware it wipes the drive you use for this mod.

First off – Install Samba

I started off by following THIS guide but never got the shares to work. I then made a new smb.conf file below and this now works:

[global]

workgroup = LIQUIDSILVER

server string = Pogoplug Samba2 Server

hosts allow = 192.168.0.  127.

null passwords = yes

guest account = root

log file = /opt/var/log/samba/log.%m

max log size = 50

security = share

encrypt passwords = no

smb passwd file = /opt/etc/samba/smbpasswd

dns proxy = no

preserve case = yes

[60GIG]

comment = 60GIG USB

path = /tmp/.cemnt/mnt_sda1

available = yes

public = yes

writable = yes

printable = no

create mask = 0777

guest ok = yes

browseable = yes

I spotted this device on ARIA and the idea sounds good, it allows you to plug in a USB Hard drive at one end, A Network lead on the other (which would go to your router let us say) and now you have a NAS box but also combined with this is a Bitorrent client which is on 24/7 and allows you to queue up and download torrents to the attached HD. The Price is: £32.14 inc. VAT- seems cheap enough right?

Description:

Another great idea from the Storage people Darkstar.
Basically turn your USB/USB2 Drives into NAS Drives
and access them on the Network as Attached Storage
This is the Single Port Version

• Supports live device status monitoring via web browser & device software
• Supports USB1.1/2.0 (Hi-Speed) specification
• Supports 802.3/3u transceiver
• Supports MDI/MDIX auto crossover function
• LED indicators for Ethernet connection
• Supports 1 SPI (HD-LANUSB01)
• Supports Ethernet protocols TCP/IP, WSD, UPnP, Bonjour
• Supports USB External HDD Enclosure, USB HDD Media player
• Interface: 1x 10/100 Base-TX Auto MDI/MDIX, 4x USB2.0 Type A Female
(HD-LANUSB04)
• Interface: 1x 10/100 Base-TX Auto MDI/MDIX, 1x USB2.0 Type A Female
(HD-LANUSB01)
• Data Transfer Rate: Up to 5MB/s
• Power Supply: 5V 1.2A
• Supports FAT 32 HDD Format
• Supports Plug & Play feature
This is the Bit torrent Version of the popular USB-to-NAS Adaptor, easy setup from Web interface and and with the in-built Bit Torrent Server, which allows direct download to the hard drive without the need for the PC being left on! – FTP access too ..Great for SoHo and energy saving !

INCLUDES:
• 1 Port NAS Adapter
• UK Power Supply
• 1x RJ45 LAN Cable
• Driver CD with User Guide

XP Or Vista Compatible

There is a few things to note though – it seems not to support all hardware, it is funny about the format and it gets very hot if left running 24/7, so maybe this is not such a good buy? A Review written by one of the buyers goes like this:

after some fuss (reciving the non bt version) ive now recived the proper Nas Dongle with BT , its more silvery gun metal than the picture and has a very nice blue LED to tell you the powers on, also a network link light is there to help you out.

setup is quite easy , plug in the power, network and a usb drive and your away, i used a 16gb sandisk cruzer ( which was at a rather nice price on superspecials) which presented some problems initaly as it seems the Nas Dongle didnt seem to like the format that sandisk had provided. Once formated by the device ( yes it does that aswell) i was good to go with an SMB server (for shareing windows files and things) and an FTP aswell, i havnt used the media server yet as i dont have a 360 or ps3 to use it with, but the options there.

lastly theres the bit torrent support, the reason i bought it.
I had planned to have a super lower power download box( nas dongle + 16gb cruzer) and this worked great for the first few hours, then i noticed that it was getting quite hot, i trialed it overnight and noticed that at some point it must have gotten to hot and it had crashed.
Restarted this morning and its working fine again.

so if your looking for a 24/7 server it might be best to look elsewhere unless you live in a very cold house, but if you dont plan on downloading that much it truly is a magic server.

3 stars as it didnt do what i had bought it for , but an amazing device non the less.