NASLite Network Attached Storage

I just got giddy reading this.
I take it that if I am short on hardware I could replace my current nas-2 usb with nas-m2 usb disk and use current raid array for both purposes of backup and audio/video streaming.

Sounds awesome. I for one welcome our new Media overlords!

Debit my card! Give me a download!

Sounds good. It is the main area I have been considering moving to W******w Home Server for. I actually have product purchase box in another browser tab but was baulking at the thought of paying the £90 licence for WHS when NASLite does *almost* everything I want, brilliantly.

Great news. Will you be emailing existing clients of 2 when it is released?

Yes, probably towards the middle or end of August - provided all goes well without show-stoppers.

Look forward to that. So is it an add-on to Naslite 2 or an extended replacement version?

NASLite-M2 is a different product altogether. The existing NASLite-2 core is way too compact for the likes of UPnP and DAAP so a bit of a departure was necessary in the design of NASLite-M2.

Hi everybody! New user here!
I'm currently looking out for an easy solution to store and manage all my data. I quickly stumbled onto NASLite because of all the good comments it receives.

I was already very happy with the features of NASLite2+, but this NASLite M2 really looks like the dogs b*ll*cks! I also like how the current path of different versions (HDD, CD, USB) will be left, providing more freedom to the user.

I actually bought Windows Home Server a couple of months ago, but since then uninstalled it because it contained too many quirks. (which can all be traced back to Drive Extender, Microsoft's new drive technology which consumes so much resources, then network performance of the entire system comes to a crawl)

I was then looking at some alternatives, and FreeNAS and NASLite came into the picture. It soon became apparrent that FreeNAS, even though it was free, was not as stable as NASLite, and that's why I left that option.

Now reading about the new and upcoming NAsLite M2, I think I'll hold off just another couple of weeks for this version. I believe the wait will be worth it.

If I get this correctly, NASLite M2 will contain all the features of NASLite+, and a media server, correct? I also get the price that has to be paid for this is a slightly larger footprint? (no problem for me though)

I will be eagerly checking out these forums on a daily basis from now on.

Hi Bart,

Your right about WHS, the Drive Extender is a hog. Ive seen transfers grind to a halt when Drive Extender starts its work which seems to be every few mins.

Naslite M2 contains all the elements of Naslite v2 with the additions of DAAP and UPNP. So you can welcome streaming your videos and music, pictures to your xbox and playstation and various other media devices,
it will have a slightly bigger footprint, this is not a problem though. its still really small.

Welcome to the forum.

I'm a new user (just set up my Naslite-2 box this past Saturday) and I'm definitely interested in this. After a few days of use I'm more than pleased with the product so far. Before purchasing the product I thought 'it'd be cool if it streamed to my 360 and PS3 but it's not a dealbreaker'.

This has put a smile on my face. Excellent product!

This is excellent news! I've been following the discussion on this issue for the last 18 months, hoping that it would lead to a product that would be the final piece in my home entertainment jigsaw, and it looks like that's the case.

I've got a couple of questions/suggestions:

• Will there be any issues upgrading from an existing NASLite-2 installation to M2? Will existing disks be recognised?
• Will there be any issues downgrading from M2 back to NASLite-2?
• I'm sure many of us have disks that are full of nothing but Media that we would like to share, and may not wish to reconstruct our directory structure. As an optional alternative to having a MEDIA folder on every drive, how about being able to name shares; if the share name contains the word MEDIA then all content on that share gets treated as if it were in a MEDIA directory?
• Ralph - I see you're running M2 successfully with iTunes on your Mac, have you tried it with Front Row? In particular, I've got a bunch of DVDs ripped as Video-TS folders on my server. iTunes can't handle those, and so I access them in Front Row outside of iTunes, but would these be shared by M2 and would Front Row pick them up correctly?
• Will you be releasing a trial version? I would prefer to have the chance of trying this out for, say, a week, to make absolutely certain that it works well with my current setup and equipment before committing to switching to it.

Anyway, well done for what's looking like a good product, and thanks for listening to your customers

I second all these questions... i current have 1TB of media on my current NL2-HDD server... while it supports my current needs nicely, it would probably better off on a platform built for this... however, i do not wish to have to lose/move my current Media to upgrade... what provisions have been made for cross-graders?

Moving to M2 should not be a problem and would be very similar to upgrading to the latest NASLite-2 version. The only exception to the rule is with existing HDD installations. In that case it may be necessary to back up the content stored on the HDD boot drive in order to prevent data loss caused during repartitioning of the drive for the larger M2 boot partition.

None that we have identified.

The configurator does not crawl the directory trees of each volume looking for MEDIA folders for obvious reasons. The intent is to explicitly place content in the Disk-X/MEDIA folders that you wish shared out for DAAP/UPNP streaming. Everything else will not be available for streaming and will be accessible only through the standard protocol set (CIFS, FTP, HTTP, etc.).

I'll leave this one for Ralph.

It is unlikely that we'll be offering a trial version of the full product. However, if you are using NASLite-2 currently, then M2 will essentially add DAAP and UPNP streaming capabilities to what you already have.

This may cause a few more problems that it did with previous products. As I understand it, UPnP streaming is something of an inexact science in practice. Although my Pinnacle Showcenter 200 is a UPnP client, it is apparently very fussy about which servers it will talk to. The fact that the latest version of the Showcenter (the 250) advertises a "much improved UPnP AV client with better compatibility to popular UPnP AV server software" demonstrates that this can be an issue.

While NasLite software is not a big investment, I can understand why people would be reluctant to buy M2 without knowing about compatibility with specific products. Maybe you could quickly start a database of any hardware with "known issues" and/or proven compatibility.

I followed these discussion a few weeks and i am happy to hear that he M2 will coming.

By following the discussion

PeterC wrote:
Will there be any issues upgrading from an existing NASLite-2 installation to M2? Will existing disks be recognised?

and Tony answered :

Moving to M2 should not be a problem and would be very similar to upgrading to the latest NASLite-2 version. The only exception to the rule is with existing HDD installations. In that case it may be necessary to back up the content stored on the HDD boot drive in order to prevent data loss caused during repartitioning of the drive for the larger M2 boot partition.

I have the NasLite2USB version so when I understand u correctly I should have no problem with that , is it correct ??

So in my little world it should be so that I dl the new version install it again on the attached USB Stick and I am all set, correct ?? The whole data which is on my Hard Drives will be be untouched.

Sounds like the NASLite M2 will come with CDD, USB, and HDD all in one. So you can pick what one you want to install.

That will be nice.

-Raymond Day