Re: Argosy HD-363N

On Saturday, January 29, 2005, 5:08:16 AM, Howard Abraham wrote:

> However, the true question was if it would be compatible with the
> AudioTron.  I copied about fifty CDs in WAV form from my music
> server to the NAS.  I then disabled my music server, added the NAS
> to my list of shares in the AT admin tool, and power cycled the AT.
> The AT detected all 60 songs without issue.  It plays them just
> fine, too.

> The Argosy HD-363N just works.  It's fast, inexpensive, easy,
> virtually silent, attractive, and barely larger than the 3 1/2" HH
> hard drive it houses.  It's fanless, but doesn't run hot.  While
> I've only had it running for a day, so far I have no reason not to
> recommend it.

Mine showed up last night, so I put the 250GB Seagate drive from my
old Linux box in it and I've been having nothing but trouble ever
since. Things started out OK; it formatted in a flash as you noticed
(in FAT32, so I suspect it's running some WinCE variant internally)
and I was able to copy my 45GB of MP3 files to it at about 3MB/sec.

But after that, things started getting weird.  I could connect to the
NAS drive through Windows Explorer and see all the directories and
files just fine, but when I ran TOCMaker and pointed it to the NAS, it
only saw 8 of the 190 directories in my music tree.  The AudioTron
seems to be doing the same thing; I can't tell if it's finding exactly
the same directories, but it's a small subset of everything on the
drive.

I tried creating a second shared folder on the Argosy and copying a
much smaller set of directories (11 of them) to it, with similar
results -- TOCMaker only seems to be able to see 8 directories, and
the AT is only seeing 3 of them.  But again, they're all visible
through Windows Explorer, and all of the MP3 files seem to play just
fine.  And if I explicitly point TOCMaker to one of the directories
it's missing then it indexes it just fine; it just seems to be having
problems finding the directories on its own.

Does anybody have any suggestions?  I'm kind of tearing my hair out at
this point; it's incredibly frustrating to have it almost but not
quite working.

(Just a few corrections to Howard's description above -- it's not
fanless; it has a temperature-controlled fan on the back panel.  And I
actually find it louder than the Linux box it's attempting to replace;
the fan is rather loud, and the HDD is coupled directly to the
aluminum enclosure so all of its noise is efficiently coupled to the
outside. On the bright side, the gizmo appears to shut down the HDD
after a period of inactivity, so it does get quieter (and more
energy-efficient) then.)

   -- Robin