40. (with egg)

There is a fix for the Vantec Nexstar LX which will allow it to work with Leopard. To skip all of this drivel and download it, click here

My NAS drive works with Leopard! As chronicled here in my other post, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has well-documented issues working with network attached storage (NAS) hard drives. Namely, no worky. The drive and its top-level folders will occasionally reveal themselves in Leopard, but they incorrectly appear to be empty.

Sad. After emailing Vantec USA, the manufacturer of my Nexstar LS NAS enclosure, regarding the issue, Vantec Technical Support replied that their development team is aware of the problem and is working on a new firmware to resolve this issue:

Our development team is aware of the problem and is working on a new firmware to resolve this issue.

Cool, but, you know... we'll see. I'm a rather jaded person when it comes to promises from tech support when they are too far away for me to walk over to and hand them a bottle of Wild Turkey as motivation to fix my problem. But, then again, I did get an email, and they do have a history of blowing my mind by actually helping me. Start the flashback machine an delay the satisfying ending to this story!

The Little Tapeworm

In 2005 I bought a Vantec hard drive enclosure -- not a NAS, just a regular ol' external enclosure. While swapping drives in and out of the thing the IDE cable shredded.

Where was I going to find a little bitty cable like that? I had about 10 full-sized cables, but the would not fit inside the enclosure, monster tapeworms that they were. So I thought, what the hell --- I'll just ask them to send me a new one.

Me:

Several days ago I bought a NexStar 2 HDD Enclosure (Model NST-355U2). Despite very gentle and careful handling, the ATA cable ripped apart and the connections on one end broke into several pieces while I was removing a hard drive from the enclosure.

Please send a replacement ATA cable to: (My address)

And 2 days later, from Vantec:

Joseph, your replacement cable was mailed out today via USPS.

BUWAAAAAAAAAAAAAA? No way. But yes way! The cute little thing arrived a couple of days later. Amazing -- actual human contact, and solutions!

The Fix

Flashback over -- back to the NAS drive. Three days ago I a received the following email from Vantec Technical Support, also know as My Homie:

We just received the new firmware this morning. I'm including the new firmware with this email... Please let us know if this help in resolving the Leopard problem with our LX enclosure.

And the firmware was indeed attached. I used the Nexstar's Windows-based firmware updater (different machine), rebooted the NAS and CHA-CHING MONEY MONEY MONEY! When I mounted the drive (and I kinda want to) the NAS worked like a charm -- all of my files, including my iTunes library were finally available again.

All is not quite perfect, though. Normally a NAS drive will show up in the "Shared" area in the OS X Finder, but mine does not. I have to manually mount the drive by either hitting CMD+K or Finder -- Go -- Connect to Server... It does not show up under "Network," either. I'll let them know, but I'm a satisfied guy considering that the NAS is fixed and Vantec kept it's promise.

Here it is, the firmware. Use it at your own risk!
Vantec Nexstar LX NAS Firmware with OS X 10.5 Leopard Fix