NASLite Network Attached Storage

Three things:

1. Your comments make it very clear that you do not make a leaving off of IT. If you did, you'd know better.

2. Go to CompUSA and ask for a free trial of WinXP. I bet they’ll decline your request as unreasonable.

3. I think you should be using freenas for a while since you like it so much. Better yet, set a RAID-5 and put all of your important files on it. You can even top that by taking it to work and selling your department’s IT guy on it. You’ll save the company a whopping $29.

I think I'll throw in my two cents - especially seeing as this is the NASLite forum.

First - you can get time limited, but otherwise full featured eval copies of most Microsoft products from Microsoft - why would you go to CompUSA - they're not the publisher.

Second - you can also get a full featured free copy of NASLite - download it here

Finally - pay the $29 - it's worth it.

Come on, we both know it is not a full featured free copy.

And yes, most MS products can be obtained for 180 day or 360 day eval, including all the server products.

And by the way, I run my own software and web service company. Right now I am leaning towards FreeNAS but waiting for FreeNAS to be more stable because it supports iSCSI, because I need around 10TB (yes, TB, not GB) storage for my next project. I want to install either freenas or naslite on cheap 1U servers with 750GB drives to keep the cost (and power consumption) down. The speed is not a big issue in my case.

Did you notice I prefaced my post with the words "especially seeing as this is the NASLite forum" ?

The link I provided will allow you to download any one (or all) of several different versions of NASLite - and they are all full featured and free.

I'll openly admit they are not NASLite+ or NASLite-2 and do not have the feature sets of those two products, but then there are separate forum sections dedicated to those products - this is the NASLite section.

A couple of months back I heard about NASLite in another forum, searched and found this site and downloaded the free version and fooled around with it some. It has it's limitations, as in fact do all of the available versions, but it was enough for me to decide that NASLite-2 is worth the $29 asking price.

You're talking about 10TB using 750 GB disks - I don't realistically see you spending less than 5G$ on the hardware - $29 represents less than 1% of your budget, you can afford to buy it, try it and dump it if it doesn't meet your needs.

Nice!

I hope your customers have a Plan-B

A couple questions here, whats ISCSI going to do for you? do you think thats going to speed up freenas's god aweful slow performance? Or, are you confused about what SAN and NAS storage is?

All I can say is this. The software works just fine with a bunch of old hardware and some very new stuff as well. And it is WAY FASTER then the old 1.0 GB version I was running. The best $29.00 I have spent in a while. Can't wait to throw in a RAID card and see it fly.

Mike

wow, we have some mean people here.

There is really no need to be so emotionally tied to a product, and got offended when people consider an alternative. If you get upset because I have some good thing to say about freenas, you really need to get a life. (this is to dimension)

On the other hand, if you would like to discuss the difference, pro and con of FreeNAS rationally, we can all help each other here.

Since I am using old hardware (to keep the cost down), the particular server I am looking at (PowerEdge 350) does not support USB boot. So I am waiting for Naslite 2.0 CD version to test it. By the way, I am a licensed user of NasLite+ 1.5 (to fordem).

Another thing(to fordem again), it will be $29 per server, not $29 for the whole thing. Still, it is money well spent if it does the job.

Meanwhile, I have tried FreeNAS and it runs on the server fine. It is particularly nice to have one version, which does boot-from-cd-save-to-floppy, install-to-usb, and install-to-hd all from the same ISO.

The reason I am using old server is not only the cost, but also low power consumption. If you ever have to deal with data center these days, you will understand why it is important.

Like I said in my previous post, speed is not an issue since this project is mainly for storage (to MotorCityKid). And for that much storage with performance not a big issue, I don't really care whether it is NAS, SAN or direct connected. I would rather have XServe RAID if I can find the case for cheap and populate with my own drives.

Actually, I have no experience with iSCSI and haven't really tried it on FreeNAS, but I am hoping to be able to use it enable Windows software RAID-1 on drives from different servers.... driver 1 from server 1 to pair with drive-1 from server 2 etc. (yes, RAID-1 means I will actually need 20TB HD's)

I do pretty well with my software, and free-trial is absolutely a key to succeed. I ask Server Elements to offer free trial because I liked their software (licensed user of version 1.5) and want them to have more customers and better sales so we all can get better software and better support. And I want them to have better sales because good software developers deserve more money.

If I don't care about Naslite, I wouldn't be posting here.

Some people get a bit worked up about this kinda thing, silly as iti is.

A couple of things.

First you talk of not being able to boot off of USB, I'm in the same boat. I just made the image on the USB key and then burnt a bootable copy to a CDROM. I then boot from the CDROM drive with the USB key in the port and all works great. I was even doing this with a 1.0 version of the software on an old P200MMX that had a USB port on it.

Second for the size of data storage you need you might be better off to set up a server with RAID6 instead. It will eat two drives per array for the parity but will give you great performance and safety. I think the newer 3Ware cards (9500 series) support RAID6. You can get a 12 port SATA controler off of Ebay for around $400.00 to $500.00 USD. These are rocking fast cards. I know that speed is not important but when you RAID that many drives together you get it as a side benny anyway.

I will say that NASLite 2.0 is a very nice product and just works and works and works......... Can't ask for much more.

Mike

Hi John, if your looking to use multiple servers like you described, iSCSI won't do what your asking. You will need a distributed filesystem like Coda or OpenAFS.

iSCSI simply encapsulates SCSI commands in IP packets, there for creating a SAN network across a WAN.

Not worked up at all really, just don't understand why you would even consider it as a solution for a client project. Tale a look at the freenas bug list. For it's track record, take a look at the freenas forum.

Actually, I did get worked up earlier in this thread, but I'm over it

My point is, if naslite doesn't meet your needs, you are better off using a full distro with webmin rather than using freenas.

I believe we were discussing free trial - how many servers do you need to try it on?

After you try it and it meets your needs, then you can purchase as many copies as you need.

fordem,

I said earlier, I am waiting for the CD version. When it is out, I will purchase one and evaluate it, just like I have evaluated FreeNAS.

dimension,

Full distro is one option, but I think we will all agree, a web control panel for the nas is way easier than installing a full distro and set up there. For one thing - if I want to install a new nas, naslite or freenas takes minutes, a full distro will take 30 minutes (at least on those old servers).

Since I will deal with about a dozen servers, an out-of-box nas OS will save significant amount of time.

mikeiver1,

I am just a little annoyed that Naslite doesn't make one installer for all purposes. I know there are way to get around the USB problem, but I would rather get an ISO file, burn a CD, and get it to work without any mod. Again, if FreeNAS can do that, there is no reason why Naslite gets so complicated.

And if I want to go with a hardware raid card, there are a lot of options out there, but that's a totally different discussion. Using cheap servers as NAS (or SAN) is one option I am evaluating with naslite or freenas. It doesn't mean I am not checking other options.

The power consumption may end up the biggest factor instead of cost.

ralph,

I would like to borrow your technical knowledge about iscsi. If iscsi encapsulate scsi commands over ip, doesn't the iscsi target behave like a drive in the server? If that's the case, cannot I use Windows software RAID to do RAID-1 with drives from different iscsi targets?

I couldn't find any info on the net. I want to try it but haven't gotten around to it yet.

John,

If you're looking for an inexpensive iSCSI SAN, OpenFiler may be a better option for you than NASLite or FreeNAS. Check it out at: http://www.openfiler.com/

-Jeff

OK, still don't understand the need for iSCSI though.

Also you can get it all done with one or two boxes and a handfull of big drives. Why make it such a big deal. Getting 20TB online is not the hastle it used to be a few years ago. I made the point of the RAID6 to point out that you can save money, hit the required storage number and still have your data secure all with the side benefite of speed. To this add that you can have a hot spare or two that will auto rebuild and are hotswapable and it's a no brainer! Also if you use NL2.0 you can have one interface/ pull point for all the storage. It works great for me.

Mike