NASLite Network Attached Storage

I have seen it cause a dip on some slower machines. The problem is noticeable on a chart only. Every minute the stats are generated, there is a slight dip in the transfer. I don't get drops in playback or anything like that. I don't know if that's the problem Myron is having, but i figured it's worth a shot.

I had it set to 05 and bumped it up to 10 to see if that makes a difference. Tony took a look at my logfile a few days ago and seems to think my problem is caused by the ATA controller not being supported by NASLite causing it to use the default driver in PIO Mode. My transfer rates start at 15MB/sec for about 15 seconds and then drop off to 4MB/sec and then to 0.20MB/sec (or worse, I've seen it drop to 0.01). I thought if they were in PIO mode they would be consistently slow rather than see them (sort of) fast and then trail off...

I actually tried the machine using FreeNAS and the transfers were much more even but the disks were running at ATA33 speeds. (And FreeNAS would automagically crash and reboot itself every 10 minutes. Nice.)

Another theory I have is that the old CD ROM drive I have connected is causing the whole controller to run at ATA33 speeds or causing some other type of conflict with the new ATA133 rated drives. I remember "back in the day" that putting one slow device on the ATA controller could cause all devices to run at the slower speeds. I think later version of Windows got around this problem but I am not sure if Linux has this problem or not.

Is there something in the logs that will tell me what UDMA mode the drives are running in?

When I have some time I will physically disconnect the CD ROM to see if that makes any difference.

Thanks.

You just need to make sure that the cdrom is on it's own PATA channel from the HDD/s. As far as windows going down to ATA33 and then up to say ATA100 of another device sharing the same ATA cable, nope it don't work like that. The bus runs at the speed of the slowest device, period. The slowest devices tri-state interface is only fast enough to listen and send at the ATA33 speed, the bus would likely just lock up if you forced it to try and run at the higher speed.

You might try an external card and see where that gets you, one that uses a supported controller. They are cheap as dirt now.

Mike

The hardware setup in the box is very messy right now and that is probably the real cause of my problems. I have an 8 port 3ware PATA RAID card (bought from a nice user on this forum) that I need to install. I am banking on that cleaning up my issues. I thought if there was an easy solution to my "slow drive" problem I would pursue that rather than tear apart the box again.

I really do not need RAID or lightening fast transfer speeds. What I do need is the ability to have 8 PATA drives of various brands and sizes run reliably.

Myron, that may very well solve your problem.

On the other hand I would strongly advise that you invest in drives of the same size, by the same manufacturer and create an array. This will then allow you to export the array as one single drive or a number of LUNs. This would allow you to have what looks like many different drives but in reality is one array. The reliability of a RAID5 array will more than pay for it's self in the long run since a failure of one drive right now will result in the loss of the data on that drive, assuming that you don't have a backup or data mirrored on another drive.

Mike

Well, that certainly is an option but not one that I want to pursue for the follwoing reasons:

- Too expensive, I already have an assortment of drives that work.
- I don't want to reformat and lose the data I have.
- Overkill for me. I use the NAS to store recorded TV shows and ripped DVD's.

My deployment is really part of my SageTV hobby, it's not mission critical. I know that many people use NL2 in an "enterprise" or "business" environment, but I do not. I do use the NL2 server to backup "personally critcal" data, and I backup the backup by mirroring it to another disk.

I'm looking for cheap, easy, and reasonably relaible. I do not need 99.999% relaibility. If I lose some TV shows because a drive fails, so be it.

I have been using the current version since it was released, the only issue I have with it is that I don't have any issues with it!

I had Purchased a neat case that another user posted on where to get it a year or two ago, and I bought back planes for it as well and a used LSI Megaraid card for it, I had some old drives laying around that I had bought used from ebay, Not one issue until yesterday when one of the drives died (raid 5) I found I had to recall some old brain cells because this box ran for over 6 months with out any intervention on my part.

I liked the LSI card so much I bought another one and put it in my PC! raid 10+1

I also use it for video and MP3's but I tell you what, when I thought I had lost this stuff I was truly miffed! then I replaced the defective drive with another one and the lsi card automatically started to set it up, the only stumbling block I had was that I ultimately needed to go into the admin pages of naslight and do a check and repair.

Since this was my first issue I had to re-learn again!

But all is good!

Thanks Server Elements!

Andy