NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello there,

I have a problem with very slow transfer rates to my old 120MHz Pentium I PC on an old Asus Board with 32MB RAM. I tried some different 3-COM 10/100 ethernet PCI cards. Shortly after switching on the PC power the 10MB LED on the ethernet card lights up. After the ready beeps the transfer speed is very, very slow and the LED still is showing 10MB only.

Now i installed a brand new Gigabit ethernet card and the result is a very fast transfer (similar to 100MB which is the speed of my router). Does someone have an idea how to solve the problem with the 3-COM cards? I have lot of them at home and do not want to throw them all away. I am pretty sure that this is not a problem with the NASLite software.

@Tony: NASLite is a very good product and i like it very much. That is the reason why i bought NASLite+ as well. This is even better and also much, much faster than the disk version.
Is there a way to accelerate the disk version as well? The reason for my question is that i do not want to loose one IDE port for the CD-ROM and none of my old PC`s can boot from USB. I would also have no problem if this version would not be for free.

Thanks and best regards
Blue skies

Well,

NASLite+ was the result of work that was done to further reduce the size of necessary components in order to provide improved Mbit functionality with the NASlite floppy disks. You may have noticed that NASLite+ occupies a mere 4Mb of RAM-Disk while providing full multi-protocol file system export.

Although we are close, a little more work is required before we have things compact enough to fit on a floppy.

Once we reach that point, we'll revisit the floppy disk products.

Thanks for support.

just a sugestion but what if.....
you were to steal 10M or so from all the fixed drives during setup for a boot partition, where the contents of the CD would be copied.
aditionally if all config settings were duplicated across all drives even if a drive were to fail the system would still boot

Not a good idea.

What happens if you have a drive in a removable tray, and the two servers you use it on are configured differently? This is common practice with NASlite servers. Better yet, what if the two servers are using different version of NASLite.

I think this approach will only create problems.

I figured out the problem with the 3COM Ethernet cards:
In my specific hardware situation the 3C905B-TX are not working properly (only with 10 mbit LED is on).
While those without the "B" are working fine (100 mbit LED is on).

Don`t ask me for the reason??? I really have no idea!

In different hardware situations i had no problem with both types of the ethernet adapters.

Best regards
Blue skies

I've had problems with certain 3Com cards not being able to auto-negotiate with cheap switches and routers, and also on some pretty expensive ones (think Intel and HP).

In all cases, they performed alright after locked into a specific media-type (100 Full or 100 Half). In the case of NASLite, you really can't tweak it tough, so I'd suggest doing as you did and getting a new/different brand NIC for this application.

In the past 6 years, I've only seen like 2 Intel Pro/100 cards go bad...