Anyone else try this? I'm looking for a cheaper solution than GlobalScale's $27 PSU (10 + shipping).

Does the power socket just plug directly into the SheevaPlug motherboard where the old one did? They look like different connectors.

I don't have any soldering experience or anything, does this solution work? Or is there anything else really simple? Anyone know of a cheap USB hub I could buy from Amazon to power it? Thanks!

I have a feeling the hard drive puts itself into standby mode or something if it's not used after X amount of hours, because it happened again the other day when I was using it, but since then I've made sure it's gotten more attention and it's been fine.  Odd.

As a warning, it's a WD Essentials, I never had this problem with my old Element though.

When I bought the Plug I had a 1TB Western Digital hard drive ready for it, and all went well for about two months or so, until things started to go crazy with the mount and I eventually plugged it into my main Ubuntu 9.04 system which immediately reported a ton of SMART errors, lots of bad sectors (I'm not blaming the SheevaPlug, hoping it was just a bad coincidence). I replaced it with another Western Digital drive (they have a nice advanced RMA... just wish I never had to use it), and after six days, I started getting "Input/output error" and "device is busy".  I restarted the Plug and all was fine.

Now, after exactly three days of uptime (I was streaming some media from the HDD/Plug and it suddenly died and I immediately ran uptime: 3 days, 1 minute), I got the error again.  I wasn't able to umount normally (device busy), so I unplugged it and plugged it into my desktop, thankfully no SMART errors, all is well.  I plugged it back into the plug and umount -l, mount -a worked.

Anyone else experience anything fishy like this?  Willing to provide any other info if it helps.

Any issues with having the host PC be 64-bit Linux?

I just got my Sheeva Plug today, is this something I should do right away?

Ordered mine August 24th, got it today! Longer than I prefer for $15 ground shipping, but at least I've got it!

Thanks for the replies, I think you've both given me enough confidence to make the purchase.  I guess I'd better order quick considering how long it takes to ship.

I've been looking at the SheevaPlug dev kit and its variants for a while now and am a bit intimidated by some of the disaster posts on this forum.  I'm a Linux user but far from super experienced, and I'm mostly just looking for something that will just work.  Key features are mounting an external hard drive, serving media on the LAN, and downloading torrents.

Is the dev kit really worth it for me?  I guess I'm comparing that to something like the PogoPlug or the TonidoPlug (though I'd rather not have to sign up for services that may go away some day just to use my hardware). What are the advantages of the dev kit?  The extra IO?

Thanks for your input, I'm excited to jump into the world of plug computing.