NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello!
Spent the last two days trying to figure out why disks gets unreachable. It seems like when you get to number 10 for disks it interfere with disk 1. I get a "*" before Disk-1 and Disk-10 so I am not able to use them. I have Naslite-M2 on USB-stick. All drives are clean and gives me OK when starting up, but they have the dreadful "*" in front of them. I pulled one disk out so the total was 9 disks and then everything was OK. Next I tried with a spare drive so the total was 11 disks and I got the same problem. Disk-1 and Disk-10 are marked with a *.

Is this a new problem?

I use a motherboard with 6 sata ports and a adapted 2610 raid card with 6 sata ports. Using only the adapted with 4 or 5 disks there is no problem. Using only the 6 sata ports on the motherboard is no problem. Using a mix of motherboard and adaptec sata ports is no problem as long as you are not reaching number Disk-10.

Any clue what this can be? Is it a bug?
For cosmetic reason I wish the presentations of disks was sorted by the letters you don't se in status menu. Now Disk-10 are in top of the list instead of last...

Thanks
Soren

Hi

Did you look at the power supply ? 10 drives pull quite a lot of current.

If I understood well, when you have 10 drives, you can access only 8 drives. What happens when you have 11 and 12 drives ? If you get 9 and 10 working drives, then the problem is a bug, if you go on adding drives and you can't see more than 8 working ones, then it is a power supply problem.

The fact that you get 1 and 10 off makes me think of a bug but it also depends where these drives are connected (MB or SATA bord)...

Regards

Ooo, good catch there on the PS Rob.

I would definitely be looking at replacing the PS with a stud duck unit of at least 750Watts. I would also be looking at the SATA card I was using with a critical eye. I have in the past hung a large number of drives off of NL with not an issue. I would be looking at the hardware rather than the software at this point.

Mike

Praise from Mike I like it very much. "You know what ? I'm happy"

Ok,

Here is an update! I took screenshots what it looks like when you start up the system with 10 disks and 11 disks (with NasLite on USB-memorystick). As you can see the "*" stays on Disk-1 + on the boot drive (10 and 11). I am now running 10 drives but I can't configure the Disk-1 drive in storage configuration. So I unplugged one drive and went to 9 drives ("*" on boot drive only) to format Disk-1 and configure, then turning off the system and plug in drive 10 and restarted. I can now use the Disk-1 (save, move and delete files), but I can't use NasLite for configuration the "*" is back on Disk-1

All the disks runs well now for the last 3-4 days but I still wonder why I get a "*" for Disk-1 when I reach total of 10 or more drives in the system? And should not the Disk-1 be unusable as it got a "*" in system config?

The drives are all WD Green 5400 rp/m and should be low on power, but yes I will have a look for a larger one (using 500 watts) thanks...

And here is the next image!

Update!

Got PSU Silverstone Strider ST1500, so lots of power.... the problem still there...

Got me at this point. I might be inclined to get one of the 3Ware cards with 12 or 16 SATA ports and see if the issue persists.

Mike

Don't get it, when only using the controller card it works fine. I did attached 4 and 5 drives to it and no problems. Then I added drives to the motherboard and no problems until I reached no 10. Install Disk-10 and above changes Disk-1 to "*" in admin configuration. The strange part is that I can use it as normal but not in the admin mode... it is locked Another raid card have to wait, the PSU was rather expensive...

Boot the installation CD and cycle thru the drives looking for configurations. verify there are no pre existing confs on your drives, which would create the *

The Drive sequence 1-10-2-3 etc is by design, Tony can elaborate on that if needed.

Thanks.

I don't have a CD player in this machine, but I guess you can use a USB memory instead! I will check if that is the case, ...could be as one of the drives was used for NASLite before, but I did remove partition and formatting correctly if my memory is correct...

Yes I would like to know why the sequence of disk is in this way as there is drive letters that would make the sequence more logical.

Thanks

removing partitions and formatting will not delete the config stuff - its buried somewhere - you need to remove it with the install program

there is a post - maybe a few detailing problems with more than one config - if i can find it will point you to it

Only way to remove a configuration is with the install cd, or zero'ing the drive out.

I had a similar problem to this using over 10+ drives. It was a number of years back and I don't remember how I resolved it. Reading through the suggestions didn't ring any bells for me.

Yes, I gave up on this after spending several days trying to solve it. I bought bigger drives and use "only" 10 drives in the NL, I might try again when upgrading, just for testing...