Playdude, i stopped fiddling with the goflex as i had trouble building openwrt for it so i put it back to the original pogoplug firmware. I've since got a few dockstars that i have been more succesful with. Once openwrt  has got to the point where I want it, i'll go back to the goflex net. The specific problem i had was getting the openwrt u-boot to work. This could have been due to my build or the goflex. For the dockstar, i did a fresh build of openwrt on another machine and this worked on the dockstar, so at some stage i will try this on the goflex. I'll also have to get a laptop sata drive to test with as i don't have one at the moment. I dare say the sata on the kirkwood is much the same as the earlier orion class of cpu, so the sata driver has some history and most likely works. There's a option for it in the menuconfig.

The power supply section of the goflex seems to run cooler than the dockstar. Has there been any reprts of the dockstars being unreliable?
The goflex has some led bars that crudely indicate the disk space of the mounted drive. I'll have to see if i can decipher what port pins these use.

Watch this space.....

Thanks for the info Kartman.

Some guy reported that he was able to boot debian on his goflex net from usb, though booting from an attached sata drive wasn't possible yet. So I think it's possible to boot openwrt from usb, then load sata drivers and mount an attached sata drive. This is what I'm trying to do if it's not possible to boot directly from a sata drive. Time to get a goflex net and test the theory...

Playdude- goflex net $129 from officeworks. I had to recover a botched load of plugapp from a friends goflex last night. Got it back to normal luckily. Boot from sata probably needs the sata stuff put in u-boot. I've not looked at this. Another thing to add to the list!

Thanks Kartman. I thought my local Officeworks didn't have it until I found it tucked away in a corner. I've had a play with it and found that I can plug a bare sata laptop hard drive on either of the 2 sata ports on top. There's no need for a goflex external hard drive. I also made a sata extension by breaking the plastic off a sata power cable and a data one.

After a brief dd test I fo that the average write speed to a connected sata drive was around 33 MB/s. So good news, I've found a cheap NAS that breaks the 30 MB/s barrier .

It was nice of seagate to use the standard sata layout. I was pondering last night how to extend the sata so that i could try a 3.5" drive as i have no laptop drives. I'll have take a look at breaking the plastic as you mention to achieve this. My initial thought was to remove two sata connectors off a dud pc motherboard and solder them back to back for a sex changer.

If anyone is interested in getting a Seagate DockStart, it is available from 1SaleADay for $17.99 (today ONLY until 23:59 EST). So, hurry up before the deal is gone.

BTW, I did an svn up today and noticed some new files for kirkwood to support the IOmega iConnect (see the screen dump below). If anyone has this device and has some guts to try, it will be good to know how good it will run OpenWRT.

 OpenWrt Kamikaze (r23218) Configuration
 ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????


       ??????????????????????????? Target Profile ???????????????????????????
       ?  Use the arrow keys to navigate this window or press the hotkey of ?  
       ?  the item you wish to select followed by the <SPACE BAR>. Press    ?  
       ?  <?> for additional information about this option.                 ?  
       ? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?  
       ? ?                  (X) Globalscale Sheevaplug                    ? ?  
       ? ?                  ( ) Seagate Dockstar                          ? ?  
       ? ?                  ( ) Iomega iConnect Wireless                  ? ?  
       ? ?                                                                ? ?  
       ? ?                                                                ? ?  
       ? ?                                                                ? ?  
       ? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?  
       ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????  
       ?                       <Select>      < Help >                       ?  
       ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

(Last edited by mazilo on 4 Oct 2010, 11:33)

I do have the guts. I just don't have the cash after the Dockstar and Goflex. Anyway I'll compile the iconnect firmware and try to chainload its uboot from my Dockstar just for fun.

I've got too many boxes on my desk at the moment:
4 dockstars
1 goflex net
1 DNS323
1 wr1043
1 friendlyarm

I just have to make these things do something useful (for me).
At the moment, one dockstar says 'intruder alert' when it detects movement. This is using motion and flite
Next step is to have it save pictures onto the DNS323 or maybe the goflex net via mysql.

BTW, is Luci working on the trunk version at the moment?

Haven't had much luck tonight - I've bricked one of my Dockstars by accidently leaving out a 0 when writing to the nand and zapping the uboot. Seems I'm going to have to learn how to jtag this. Secondly, another Dockstar reports a Nand size of 512MB and the secondary uboot complains of bad ecc and bad crc when loading the kernal image. Did some Dockstars get 512MB nand??

I did some checking of the part number of the 512MB flash - it all checks out! Must've been the lucky golden one. Since I'm relatively inexperienced with these things, what is the impact upon the build? ie what things would I need to alter to accomodate the larger nand?

It's not a myth. A few others have 512 MB ones too.

plugapps.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=136

They say these are from earlier batches.

they are a few of them circulating around.
Any visible difference on the packaging box or date next to PN#

I purchased 6 from the US and two of them have 512MB. There doesn't seem to be any obvious means of determining the difference externally - not that I've found.

Any deals of this in the UK ?

This deal had long been gone forever, AFAICT.

Yeah, but im looking for one in the UK..

Your best chance is to search through the UK online-based e-bay site. Your other option is to scour through some local thrift stores in your area. Since DockStar is a discontinued product, I would certainly look for other device, i.e. Seagate GoFlex, etc., unless I can get it very inexpensive.