Question Read and Edit Files simultaneously on multiple devices from an HDD ?

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waghela

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Mar 15, 2014
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Good afternoon

I want to purchase equipment that allows me to access, save and edit files directly and simultaneously on one or more hard drives from Desktop, laptop and smartphone.

I found in an online store these devices that seem to me to be useful for this purpose (see following links).

However, as I have no knowledge in this matter, I can't understand how I'm going to configure it if there is no video output that allows me to configure these equipment’s, assuming that the mouse and keyboard connect to the USB port?

If I mount two 6TB hard drives, the storage capacity will appear as if it were a single 12TB drive, or will it only be possible to work on two 6TB drives separately?

Which connection port is advantageous for network sharing: Ethernet 1 Gbs or USB 3.2 gen 1 6Gbs?

FANTEC_CL-35B2 has a SATA I interface. Does it support an 8 TB SATA III hard drive?

FANTEC QB-35US3-6G_eSATA_USB 3.2 GEN1_Page_1
FANTEC QB-35US3-6G_eSATA_USB 3.2 GEN1_Page_2

FANTEC_CL-35B2_Ethernet_Page_1
FANTEC_CL-35B2_Ethernet_Page_2
 
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waghela said:
However, as I have no knowledge in this matter, I can't understand how I'm going to configure it if there is no video output that allows me to configure these equipment’s, assuming that the mouse and keyboard connect to the USB port?

If I mount two 6TB hard drives, the storage capacity will appear as if it were a single 12TB drive, or will it only be possible to work on two 6TB drives separately?

Which connection port is advantageous for network sharing: Ethernet 1 Gbs or USB 3.2 gen 1 6Gbs?
Click to expand...
A web interface is normally used to configure a NAS. You just connect it to the network, and then open the web interface by putting the IP address into your web browser. (How you find the IP may vary with different devices.)

A NAS such as the Fantec "CL" device will use some form of RAID to combine hard drive capacities and/or provide redundancy, and it's all seen as one location to your desktop, laptop and phone (a mapped drive letter). Normally if you use two drives, they are set up as a mirror (RAID1), with the content duplicated on both drives so that if one fails, there is still a copy on the other drive and you can just replace the bad drive. So in your example of two 6TB drives you would only have 6TB of capacity to use and it would appear as a single location to the devices that access it, unless you choose to configure it to look like multiple locations which doesn't seem like something you want. If you need 12TB, you would either get two 12TB drives, or need a NAS model that lets you use three 6TB drives in RAID5, which provides redundancy and capacity. It still will appear as only one location to your other devices. (RAID0 is another option to get 12TB with only two drives, which also increases performance, but it's not a good option because if one drive fails then all your data is lost.)

The "BIG" option on the device basically just combines the capacity of the two drives, without any redundancy or performance increases. It is still shown to your computers as a single location, and when you save a file it just gets saved to one drive or the other. If one of the drives fails, some of your files will be lost. (It could be most of them, it could be a few of them, it could be half, depending on how this model allocates them and how full it is.)

I don't see anything about the NAS only supporting SATA version 1. It doesn't specify the version at all, so it's likely either version 2 or 3. In any case, a SATA3 hard drive is backward compatible and will work, and you would probably be fine even with 12TB drives. Fantec's site's specs say "unlimited" so you might even be able to use the most recent sizes like 24GB.

https://fantecshop.de/en/p/fantec-cl-35b2

The front USB port on the NAS is used for connecting an external drive for backing up the files that are stored on the NAS, which is highly recommended. The port on the back if for connecting a printer. Neither of them is used for sharing the files to your computers.

A device like the Fantec "QB" unit is just used to connect multiple hard drives to your PC with a single USB cable. In this model, there is no RAID, so your computer would see two separate 6TB hard drives with two different drive letters. You would have to set up Windows file sharing on those drives in order to let the laptop and phone access the files. That means if your desktop gets turned off, the files are unavailable, and it would be two different shared folders. There are other models that perform RAID, so that your computer would only see it as a single USB drive with one drive letter, which would make it easier to share the files, but it still depends on the desktop computer for sharing.

As far as speed, the USB 3.2 Gen 1 connection would theoretically be faster, but since you'd only be accessing one drive at a time the actual speed would not be any better than 1Gb LAN. And if the desktop PC only has a 1Gb LAN connection, that would limit the file sharing speed even if the Fantec was faster. Even with RAID, unless you have at least 4 mechanical drives in the right kind of RAID configuration, 1Gb LAN is plenty of speed. So a NAS like the Fantec CL device is the recommendation between the two options you gave.

cruisetung said:
This is USB 2.0 old stuff from 2014 and not a real NAS. Dot not buy it. As suggested, acquire a Synology or QNAP NAS.
Click to expand...
It's not an outdated device in technology, and it is a NAS. The USB 2.0 applies only to the port used for connecting an external drive for additional storage (probably rarely used) or for backups to an external drive, or for a printer. That says nothing about the NAS/network performance, only that it's a lower-end (meaning inexpensive) device where they didn't bother to put in USB3 for a port that doesn't really need to be fast. Plenty of modern systems like laptops still come with a USB 2.0 port because it costs less and there are still uses for it. Fantec still sells the device directly, and other than the USB port speed, the specs are pretty much the same as any other low-end 2-bay NAS on the market but at a very low price. (There's nothing about the CPU or RAM or OS in it, so it's not likely to be capable of running other applications and acting as a server, but that's clearly not the intent at this price point. It's JUST a storage server. )

The only thing that makes this device somewhat outdated is, as Fantec themselves acknowledge, the cloud services and storage that it connected to, which have been discontinued. If you didn't care about those in the first place, that's not an issue, nor is it something only Fantec has run into, and again, it's a CHEAP device.
 
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cruisetung said:
I admit the FANTEC model OP mentioned was a real NAS. But it's so outdated that I'll discourage him acquiring it.

Its spec sheet does not even reveal what CPU and how much memory was used.

Asustor is another option besides Synology/QNAP
Click to expand...
Again though, it's cheap and will work perfectly fine to serve files to other devices on the network. (After digging, it is definitely old, released in 2011. But old doesn't mean obsolete. Some functions don't need improvement.) CPU and RAM and software are only important if you're trying to do other things on the device. The fact that they still produce it and their marketing sheet for it was updated to indicate compatibility for Windows 10 shows that it still handles its intended purpose absolutely fine. Why pay nearly 4 times the money to add a bunch of capabilities that OP isn't looking for? (It's only 54 euros directly from Fantec.)

The CL-35B2 seems like the perfect answer to just having files available to multiple devices on a network without it being plugged into a particular PC that is always up and running. (Of course there are other brands but they cost much more. I can't find ANY that don't have far more performance than is needed and a bunch of bells and whistles.)

The only possible improvements they could make to the thing are USB3 for the external drive so that backups of very large amounts of data don't take an entire day (the thing was released when 4TB drives were the new hotness) and 2.5GbE which would allow users to take advantage of SATA SSDs in adapters as well as the maximum sequential speeds of newer HDDs.
 
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The first issue that OP might encounter by acquiring outdated NAS is NAS's web UI browser compatibility.

The old NAS probably only works with old versions of browsers. OP might have to find out himself what still works and what doesn't.
 
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evermorex76 said:
Again though, it's cheap and will work perfectly fine to serve files to other devices on the network. (After digging, it is definitely old, released in 2011. But old doesn't mean obsolete. Some functions don't need improvement.) CPU and RAM and software are only important if you're trying to do other things on the device. The fact that they still produce it and their marketing sheet for it was updated to indicate compatibility for Windows 10 shows that it still handles its intended purpose absolutely fine. Why pay nearly 4 times the money to add a bunch of capabilities that OP isn't looking for? (It's only 54 euros directly from Fantec.)

The CL-35B2 seems like the perfect answer to just having files available to multiple devices on a network without it being plugged into a particular PC that is always up and running. (Of course there are other brands but they cost much more. I can't find ANY that don't have far more performance than is needed and a bunch of bells and whistles.)

The only possible improvements they could make to the thing are USB3 for the external drive so that backups of very large amounts of data don't take an entire day (the thing was released when 4TB drives were the new hotness) and 2.5GbE which would allow users to take advantage of SATA SSDs in adapters as well as the maximum sequential speeds of newer HDDs.
Click to expand...
I think that since my goal is solely to share a disk simultaneously by several devices, evermorex76's arguments are convincing, given that the NAS I intend to purchase supports 6TB SATA III disks and Windows 10 OS.

One issue: you can find new SATA I or SATA II disks cheaper than SATA III.
 
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cruisetung said:
The first issue that OP might encounter by acquiring outdated NAS is NAS's web UI browser compatibility.

The old NAS probably only works with old versions of browsers. OP might have to find out himself what still works and what doesn't.
Click to expand...
Given that they list Windows 10 compatibility, I don't think there will be any browser issues for some time to come. The only issues that old web interfaces like that tend to run into are SSL/TLS compatibility, and TLS 1.3 isn't going to become unusable for a while. There's not much chance that it uses Java or Flash.

waghela said:
One issue: you can find new SATA I or SATA II disks cheaper than SATA III.
Click to expand...
I still don't know where you're getting that the NAS only supports SATA1. SATA3 was introduced two years before this device came out. The reason a SATA1 or SATA2 disk is cheaper is because they're OOOOOOLLD. Nobody has made anything but SATA3 drives for at least 15 years. If you're looking at 1 and 2 version drives, they're probably used/refurbished, and even if they're not, the physical media of mechanical drives does begin to degrade eventually while just sitting in storage, which could mean the drives may not have a long lifespan. I can't imaging the cost savings is enough to justify the risk. SATA2 will also mean that the drives are MUCH slower physically than current drives simply because they won't be using modern technology, even though the interface has plenty of speed. You probably can't even find SATA2 drives large enough anyway.

Don't forget that you will need 12TB drives if you want to have 12TB of storage space available and want to have RAID1 mirroring for redundancy.

cruisetung said:
The NAS's web UI relies on Flash technology that no modern browsers support,
Click to expand...
I hate you for making me visit the Grok site, but also Grok, like all other "AI" isn't perfect. They're pulling that from the fact that the information pages have under "Services" the line "Flash user interface". There is zero other information that references Flash, and I question whether that actually means it uses Adobe Flash for the web interface or refers to something else, or if it's an optional interface. Even if it had one originally, I can't believe they wouldn't have updated it by the time they added Windows 10 compatibility to the marketing, or that they would actually still be selling a device where no computer using software made in the last 5 years would be able to manage it. (Of course their manual does appear to show them using Windows XP for their apps.) The online manual shows how to log in, and makes no mention of needing to have Flash support.

Digging further, I see that "InteractiveSharing" is their name for their interface to the NAS, a "desktop" which runs in the browser similar to other brands. There is information about its requirements at this link, which haven't been updated to include Windows 8 or 10 so some of them may have changed with later firmware after support for Flash was going away. The last firmware is only from 2014, though.

http://manuals.myfantec.de/cl-35b2/wiki/interactivesharing.html

It indicates that Flash is needed only for "Album View", while other plugins are needed for displaying media just like all browsers needed back then. My interpretation of this page is that the basic functions can be managed with any browser, including modern ones.

And rather than just go back and forth indefinitely, I sent an email to their service address to ask.

So yes, it's old, but as long as it can be managed, it's still not obsolete.
 
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Windows compatibility has nothing to do with website/webUI Flash compatibility, it's completely different stuff.

Vendor can claim compatibility however/whatever they want. The fact is a lot of time it's false, especially for old devices.

Grok provide a lot more detailed results than other AI engine and I never claim it's 100% correct. Readers always have to pay their due diligence to investigate further to verify it.

You can continue to believe what you believe, I have no further comments.
 
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cruisetung said:
Windows compatibility has nothing to do with website/webUI Flash compatibility, it's completely different stuff.
Click to expand...
I'm aware of that, but being compatible with the OS likely means it's compatible with the applications such as browsers that will be used with that OS, at least in the essentials. If Flash were an essential feature to even be able to open the web interface, then it would most likely be stated quite plainly in the manual. (Every product I ever saw that depended on Flash actually carried the Flash logo on the package or on the website for software products.) In addition, there are extensions for browsers which will allow you to run older Flash applications, if those features are essential.

What I believe is what I've seen, which is that there is every indication that this product is fully capable of working with a modern PC to fulfill the basic required function of serving files over the network, makes no claims that it has the performance or software features to run add-in services/applications, that the maker has clearly indicated that some of the software features it originally came with ARE outdated and unusable as they are no longer supported by third-party services or software, and that the product is priced well based on the capabilities that it does have, and does not force the user to pay for a bunch of features they don't need. (I couldn't find ANY modern devices that JUST acted as a file server with RAID and those few built-in features like this Fantec originally had, and no devices that weren't 3 times the price or more and far overpowered for this purpose. Manufacturers seem to have no interest in selling low-cost devices like that now that they have the capability of stuffing so much more in a small box.)

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I'll post if Fantec actually replies.

Edit to add, when posting nothing but two links from Grok or any AI and making statements as above, it's clear that the poster is in fact accepting Grok's results as being correct and telling the reader that they should accept it as well, not that they should dig further to verify the results or get more details.
 
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cruisetung said:
Windows compatibility has nothing to do with website/webUI Flash compatibility, it's completely different stuff.

Vendor can claim compatibility however/whatever they want. The fact is a lot of time it's false, especially for old devices.

Grok provide a lot more detailed results than other AI engine and I never claim it's 100% correct. Readers always have to pay their due diligence to investigate further to verify it.

You can continue to believe what you believe, I have no further comments.
Click to expand...
Excuse me for my inorance, but I don't understand anything about the SMB that the brand claims to support.

Is the access to files through SMB done in an application other than the browser and also allows you to edit the files directly on the NAS?
 
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I'm not Linux expert. All info from the internet.

http://manuals.myfantec.de/cl-35b2/wiki/isharing_gpl.html

So this Fantec NAS's iSharing desktop (running in browser) is from Fedora 12 (2009)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_Linux

Samba info from this page
  • samba-winbind-clients-3.4.2-47.fc12.armv5tel
  • samba-common-3.4.2-47.fc12.armv5tel
  • samba-3.4.2-47.fc12.armv5tel
http://manuals.myfantec.de/cl-35b2/wiki/isharing_changelog.html
No mention of samba version been updated to SMB v2
So I believe it's still SMB v1, and you have to enable SMB 1.0 in Win10/11

Full support of SMB 2.0 starts from samba 3.6

Samba (software) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

You have to visit following links to see the NAS's UI, I really have no idea whether the NAS's website can run without problem in modern browsers (even if with Flash Emulator like Ruffle)

http://manuals.myfantec.de/cl-35b2/wiki/home.html#my_server

Take you own risk. (only 53.99 euro) As suggested by @evermorex76 , it's 3 times cheaper than newer NAS.

iOS 13 seems to support SMB, but I have no idea what Android phone support SMB natively.

==

https://www.jacob.de/produkte/FANTEC-CL-35B2-1558-artnr-1223887.html

A user at webpage bottom said it's SMB 1.0 (use Google translation)
 
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waghela said:
Is the access to files through SMB done in an application other than the browser and also allows you to edit the files directly on the NAS?
Click to expand...
SMB is the protocol you're using when you browse the network in Windows with File Explorer. The open source software that implements the SMB protocol is called Samba, which is used in things like Linux. SMB is just a protocol that allows the operating system to "see" the files, so you have to use an application like File Explorer to actually open the files. (A web browser doesn't speak SMB.)

You work with the files on the NAS just like you would if they were on a hard drive in your computer. Normally, you would map a drive letter to the location on the NAS, so for example your P drive would point to //NAS_NAME/myfiles, and then every program on your computer that knows how to locate files on a drive letter would be able to access those shared files. Those applications don't understand SMB just like they don't know anything about SSD drivers and NVMe or SATA protocol. They just talk to the operating system, which itself knows how to get the files through SMB. (There are some rare apps that don't use the standard methods and might not display a mapped drive letter, but they're usually old and niche.)

There's really no way for us to know for sure what version of SMB is supported by the Fantec unit without contacting them or finding someone that has one. The last firmware update was in 2014, which was just before Windows 10 came out. It's likely that it does support SMBv2 and SMBv1 since both of those were widely used in 2014. SMBv3 was also available since 2012 and could maybe be in this one, but many devices wouldn't have updated to that version for several years, and even now some don't support it.

Microsoft has deprecated SMBv1 because it's insecure, and it's not enabled by default anymore. It's not even installed in Windows 10/11 by default. I'd say there is a very good chance that SMBv2 is supported by the Fantec unit, as they likely did update to the latest available version of Samba (4.1 maybe, which also supports SMBv3) with that final firmware upgrade, in order to keep the device "plug and play" for anyone using anything past Windows 8, otherwise they'd have to tell users that they needed to dig into their OS and enable the old, insecure SMB version.
 
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cruisetung said:
So who is correct here and who is arrogant? Vendor might just update it's firmware for any security reason and you just assume it's functionality update. This user just bought the NAS in 2024 and it's still SMB 1.0
Click to expand...
So you edited your post to add a new link that supports the SMBv1 assertion and try to use that as me claiming arrogance as if I'd just ignored the link before?

Your unedited post was just making assumptions that because the very old documentation and images didn't mention SMBv1 that meant it still only supported v1, ignoring the possibility that the firmware released FIVE YEARS later might have added v2 support. I didn't say it DID add it, only that it seemed LIKELY to me given that they're claiming Windows 10 support and because v2 had been available for some time, so it would have made sense to add it when they were going to keep selling the thing for another 10+ years.

Yes, that user report does support the likelihood that it's only v1, but it's a single user with no confirmation of their firmware version, and I'd still like to get confirmation from the vendor if I was trying to buy this particular device.

I notice that at least that vendor jacob.de lists the operating systems only up to Windows 7, even though Fantec's own documents include Windows 10 which would be at the least misleading if it requires manually enabling an insecure protocol. Maybe they have a huge batch of older units that don't have the latest firmware.
 
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Asking users with little experience to purchase outdated devices is what upsets me.

It's not your money so you can say anything and do not have to be responsible for it.

Believe whatever vendors say just make me laugh to the death, You are ignored.
 
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Not giving a user as much information as possible and letting them make their own decision is what "upsets" me. Accepting generated results from AI as gospel upsets me. Editing posts to try to make someone else look bad upsets me.

Aside from the possible SMB version issue, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using this device in 2025. It will function exactly the same as any brand new model that costs 3 times as much when used for the sole purpose of serving files over the network, and if the manufacturer is still selling it they will still support it. (Especially in Europe where corporations don't just get to do anything they want with no consequences unlike in the US.)
 
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