NASLite Network Attached Storage

I've gotten NASLite-SMB happily running on a P200 with 16MB RAM and 4 old IDE drives between 80MB & 1.6GB in size (its what i have at hand to test this thing actually works).

It's running fine and I'm thinking of saving for a 250GB HDD (eventually 4 of them in total) but I'm worried about whether there are any problems running these newer and larger hard drives on such old hardware.

Are there hardware limitations that would prevent NASLite from being able to use the full 250GB drive or would it be restricted to 40GB or something? Also does system RAM have any impact on NASLite, I can put 32MB in but would rather just stick with the 16MB so I can use the SIMMs in another machine.

I'd like to be sure that if I spend the money on a large drive that it will work fine in this machine (I'm currently unemployed, so "blowing" the money on a drive I can't use is not an option...I have no other machines I could put a 250GB drive into).

So far my testing is going great - streaming mp3 & avi files from the P200 without a glitch...awesome job guys!

Thanks for any help.

bigger drives are no problem at all, thou it is adviseable to get some more memory with larger drives

64 to 128mb with 250gb drives is a good idea

i use 128mb with an 160gb drive (64mb ran out of cache after a while, expecially while diskchecking during boot-up)

Hy,

i'm going to plan the same as pelmen mentioned.
My "problem" was what would be happen if there is a power outage or something else is happening? Is there Journaling or something else in there ?

any idea how the caching required could be determined? i'm new to where i live atm so i don't know anyone i can borrow a large hard drive from to test for a bit before commiting to buy one. for example is 1KB ram needed for each file? what is cached anyway during boot up? the largest drive i have to test with is 1.6GB and i filled it with over 150,000 files (icons) and there was no problems with boot up with those. in practice i won't be storing small files anyway, basically just MP3, movie files and system backups so the total number of files on each drive won't be too high.

even second hand SIMMs are very expensive for 32MB or higher amounts per SIMM...my motherboard only has two SIMM slots so even if i could find 64MB SIMMs they would be massively priced here. only have 8MB and 16MB SIMMs in my spare parts box.



regarding power outage: i'd suggest if you are able to get a suitable uninterruptable power supply or at least a proper line filter (from a UPS maker) to make sure the machine is getting clean current. i have pulled the power on mine while testing and there were no problems, it just rebooted and all the files were fine. i wasn't writing to the drives though, but i was reading from them. even streaming the same MP3 multpile times simultaneously didn't encoutner any problems (i loaded up many different players on my machine and each one i got to read the same file from the fileserver and set each one to a different part of the file to play.. no problems at all).



thanks

nobody seemed interested or able to answer my original question of what is the oldest/minimum hardware that will support large (eg 250GB) hard drives...if the BIOS won't handle them then NASLite can't do anything with them.

I have three Pentium (166, 200 & 233) motherboards. Two failed to see the drive at all, the third did see it, and i was able to force it to recognise it as 250GB but after a reboot it failed to recognise it anymore no matter what changes I made.

I now have a PII-400 w/ 192MB and that works happily. On a note if you are checking how your BIOS reports the hard drive size and see a different size than expected don't worry. Even my P4 system only reports my 250GB drive as 8GB in the BIOS but its fine in the OS. This PII motherboard I got also sees it as 8GB but booting up the NASlite disk and you'll see it reported as 250000MB in all the text that scrolls up.

So far the machine has over 100,000 files and at 78% full and no problems. Something I wasn't prepared for was the time it takes to get the drive set up with NASLite though for the first time, so if you're unprepared you might just think the machine has frozen up or something is wrong. When I created the drive using the "1 C" option so that it did a thorough drive check it took just on 24hr to complete this step for the 250GB drive on the PII system. Once its set up though the machine boots up no slower than my earlier P-233 tests with small drives.

Good luck

Hello Pelmen,

as you can see I have now the One-Terrabyte Server on. As you mentioned I get an old USV an refurbished the Batteries.

My System was as mentioned an Pentium II-500 with at least 256MB of Ram and 4 Hitachi 250GB HDDs.
On http://www.terrabyteserver.de.ms you can see that everything worked. only the Bios says "S.M.A.R.T. Support turned off" for all HDDs, but thats no Problem or NasLite.

The Init of one (!) 250GB Drive tooks at least half an hour. But then after 2hours of init it goes very well.

NASLite does not care what size the drives are, as far as I can tell anyway. One thing that you might want to do is turn off hard drive detection on your MB since NASLite does not use that info anyway. You can easily put in a 250 GB drive and run with it without any major problems.

Hope this helps out.

Great job on the terabyte server.. I'm jealous



As for the HDD size issue I am fully aware that NASlite deals with it...you didn't read what I posted though...it DOES matter what the motherboard/BIOS sees...if it can't recognise the drive it will basically disable that IDE position so NASlite won't be allowed to even see the drive itself. THIS is the problem I was trying to sort out because firstly I have old motherboards already and secondly I am unemployed so I can't even afford to waste a little money on buying even more second hand machines to test. I wanted to find out what other people had experienced and gotten setup. Other forum posts hadn't clarified the issue.

I have my NAS box running NASLite-SMB and I have the CMOS setup so that it does not autodetect any of the drives and it works just fine. My NAS box is a Pentium 100 with 48 MB of RAM.

I think that the motherboards that you have will work just fine. The best way to find out if they will work is to just try them out.

pelmen- read the docs. first page "Why use NASLite-SMB?"

*BIOS independent fixed disk drive support

and:

"In addition, NASLite-SMB enables older computers with BIOS limitations to use contemporary, large-capacity IDE fixed disk drives without the need for additional hardware."

so you should be able to use what you have, unless it's ridiculously old (like a commodore 64 or something). and if that's the case, you have other things to worry about than getting a naslite server up

read my post again... i HAVE tried everything in the BIOS... everything means EVERYTHING... including disabling the drives, setting none, settings auto, using custom settings etc ... everything the BIOS had to change I changed.. on three Pentium motherboards. So this "BIOS independance" so far for my spare motherboards means nothing. These boards basically close down the IDE channels it seems once they fail to see a drive. on the only occassion NAS did get to see a drive after it configured the drive and i rebooted the machine the drive could no longer be seen by either the bios or NAS again no matter what i tried. This was on the motherboard I'd been running four smaller (sub 6GB) drives 24hr for several weeks with no problems.

i've gotten the large hard drive running on a PII board so i couldn't care less now since nobody here was willing to help when i badly needed it.

sounds like you got it running, so it's probably moot, but no where in your prior messages you said you tried everything in the bios. you just mentioned something about what capacity the large drive displays as in the bios.

perhaps you would've gotten better customer service if you had stated what motherboard make/models and BIOS versions you were actually trying to use, instead of just saying they were 166-233's. there's a lot of mobos in that range and all of them run different BIOS software.

maybe the nas software does indeed have a problem with the crappy boards you were using, but no one could tell from the info you gave.

Hi pelmen,

Getting frustrated is probably not necessary. Ringworm has a point. Please understand that there are countless hardware combinations that have their own particular idiosyncrasies. Simply saying “I have a spare board that doesn’t work!” means little without some details. If other people are not reporting similar problems, then it’s possible that you have a very obscure board.

A good support example is http://www.serverelements.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=69

It’s important that you provide enough information that may prompt someone to take your problem on. Anyway, I’m happy to hear that you have a working NASLite server that is doing its job as intended.

BTW - I have personally had a 486DX100 with 32M RAM and a set of 80G drives using NASLite-SMB so the BIOS independence is in fact a valuable feature.

Hello Wonderer,

my 1. Part of the "Serverelements-Project" was successful.
I've used a PII/333 with 1x 80 GB IDE HD booting from CD, everything is working.

but the 2. Part of the "Serverelements-Project" failed:
using the same PII/333 with 2x 200 GB IDE HDs.
The BIOS doesn't want to identify both harddisks

The mainboard is an INTEL AL440LX board.

Which kind of Pentium-Board type is recommend to use IDE-HDs equal or bigger 200 GB ?

Thanks in advance

Best regards

DGS

>The BIOS doesn't want to identify both harddisks

NASLite doesn't use the BIOS, makes no difference the size of drives used.

Does NASLite itself see the drives?