NASLite Network Attached Storage

You are my favorite person right now. Says I should get a battery back up, is it talking about the little batteries that plug directly into the board? Or a big one that plugs into the computer? It looks to be staying around 28-31MB/s!!!

The BBU is a 3Ware daughter board that plugs onto the Raid card Should be available I guess for arround $100 on Fleabay

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=390275865667&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.com%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dp5197.m570.l1313%26_nkw%3D390275865667%26_sacat%3DSee-All-Categories%26_fvi%3D1&_rdc=1

Your other option may be a UPS which will keep the whole machine up for a while in the event of a power outage (I infact do this for the backup machine and when I get chance and some musscle type help the primary machine will go into the same rack and be fed by the UPS also).
Might even be the cheaper option.

Not sure if this is the correct one for your card but it seems about right.

Doug

Yeah, I am already looking for two, one for my main machine and one for my NAS.

Thank you so much for the help!

Thank you as well Mike

On a reboot of the nodes (computers, printers, scanners, etc.) of a network one generally turns everything off first. Then bring up your core switch first. Next the router to the internet. The firewall is the next thing, you are running a firewall aren't you? Then the server/s. Next the clients. Finally the Misc. stuff like printers etc.

The switches "Should" negotiate the connection speed and "plex" of each connection on a port by port basis. If the connection is between a 100Mb and a 1Gb device then the switch will store and forward packets to and fro as well as throttle the packets from the faster device. This happens with no interaction from you or me. It is not always seamless though. There are times when you may have to force the NICs into the appropriate configuration. There is plenty of info on the web if your are interested.

As to your poor write performance the battery is likely not going to be any help. The first thing I would look at is the status info of the RAID card and see if you have a failed drive and are running in degraded mode. This may be the reason for the poor write performance. Another thing you need to look at is the stripe size your friend set the RAID card to use. If you are writing video files mainly to the array a larger stripe should perform better and reduce the I/Os per second to the drive. The 3Ware cards have allot of configuration available from what I can tell and tuning them is a bit of an art. Hell tuning any RAID controller for the best performance in your task is a bit of an art.

An UPS is a good idea for the servers but unless you have one of them send the NASLite box a shutdown then it doesn't do a whole lot of good if the power fails. It will however help with brown outs and short term losses so it is still a "Do it" kind of thing.

For the memory there is a limit (4GB) to that usable on the 32bit machine under Linux and windows. Under 64 bit it is far higher. I would be running the 64bit and 8GB of RAM on a server like yours. Memory is cheap and the cache headroom it provides helps with transfers.

Hope this helps.

Mike