NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello,

I recently mounting 4 HDD on a IT8212 RAID PCI Card (with Bios V.1.4.1.6).
I mount the HDD in mirror mode.
I install NasLite without any problem, but I can't see any drive in the Nas Menu.

I just see this message:
ls: /etc/ServerElements/nldev/Disk-*: No such file or directory

Somebody have a solution??

NB: excuse me for my poor english....

This is not a hardware RAID card and is therefore not supported. Take a look at the NASLite-2 Hardware Guide for details.

I recently bought a Syba IT8212 PCI card for US$12.98 (!). Objective was to add IDE ports to Abit iL-90MV, but also to do my first experimentation with RAID (!) ... under Windows. Never done RAID before and wanted to learn something new.

I am well aware of many discussions on the NASLite forum about real-hardware-RAID, fakeRAID and software RAID.

The card has 2 ports, supporting 4 IDE devices. I connected a Seagate and a Maxtor, each 160GB, on ports 0&1, each configured as Master, and configured for RAID-1 (mirror). Installed Windows. Played for a while, worked well. Even used AcronisTrueImageHome11 (which I suspect uses a derivative of Linux) to make a backup image to another partition on the same array ... was slow, but worked (1.64GB image in about 1 hour). Performance in regular use under Windows is good (68MB/s near begining of disk, 40MB/s near end using HDDTune).

Ok ... so now to the interesting part !

Searching around a little with google, there seem to be differing opinions on whether this is a REAL HARDWARE RAID card (here) or FAKE-RAID (here).

So ... I re-initialized the card for RAID-1 again (wiping out the Windows stuff). Then installed NASLite CORE3 v2.60b [RC4]. IT WORKED !!! Except: the Disk-0 is shown as 126GB ????

I also booted off RIP-LinuX-9.3. "fdisk -l" reports 137,438,952,960 bytes. So ... I am obviously hitting the infamous "137GB" limit. But 126GB is 135,291,469,824, which is NOT 137GB. It should be 128GB (= 137,438,953,472). And the card's BIOS definitely sees the entire 160GB (before loading of Windows drivers), as does Windows. And under RIP-LinuX-9.3 "hdparm" shows "using_dma = 0", and "hdparm -t" gives 1.66MB/sec (But transfer (write) of a 1.64GB file in NL2 was good.)

The I booted Ubuntu9.4 Desktop LiveCD. "fdisk -l" sees 160,041,884,672 bytes. and "hdparm -t" gived 63.11 MB/sec, but "hdparm -d" does not show any info regarding "using_dma". Even more interesting ... after I MOUNT the NL2-formatted disk ... "df -h" reports a Size of 126GB !!!!

Which of you experts on this forum would like to help me with an explanation ?

More info.

I re-initialized the array again in the PCI card's BIOS; this time in NON-RAID mode. Then booted NL2 CORE3. It now (as expected) sees TWO drives, and they have identical content (also expected). But without re-formatting in NASLite ... both drives are still showing as 126GB.

So ... format Disk-1 (requires a couple of reboots). It formatted as 146.7GB !! (the expected size for 160GB HDD). (Actual block count shown in http://<ip_addr>/Status/htm/storage-Disk-1.htm is 39,070,080.)

So now I am a little less confused. Obviously there's a problem in some versions of Linux that mis-identified the disk (fdisk) as 136GiB (RIP-LinuX and NL, but not Ubuntu). But there's also the issue of NL2 not formatting to the full capacity if the disk was previously formatted under (for example) Windows. (My suspicion now is that I had left unformatted some unused space 24GiB of it in the RAID-1 array.)

Next step: wipe the MBR on both disks, re-initialize as RAID-1, and try NL2 again. And if all that works (!) then I got me a US$13 RAID card that works with Windows **AND** NASLite2 ! (Yes, I like to be "cheap" ... ahem ... I mean "cost-effective".)

No ... did not work. ( I had used RIP-LinuX-9.3 and "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hd[ce] bs=1024 count=1000" on each of the two non-raided disks. Then RAID-1 and format in NL; result single 126GB DISK-0. )

So ... since Ubuntu9.04 seems to be the most "intelligent" ... try same procedure, but skip the count and wait until each of the two disk are wiped in their entirety. (at about 36MB/s average = about 2.5 hours for both disks).

I'll report again when done ...

No. Didn't work.

Next test. Boot RAID-1 array with Ubuntu9.04. Wipe MBR/PartitionTable. Create Primary partition. Create an ext3 filesystem. Reboot with NL.

Disk-0 (storage device) shows up with a "[FAIL]" before login. After login Disk-0 (DEVICE-HDA) shows as NOT MOUNTED, but option 1 shows RW, and options 1,2,5,6,7,8 are available. I tried option 5 ("Check Disk-0 Filesystem") and get the following:

So ... Ubuntu can see a 160GB RAID-1 ARRAY and format 39,072,080 blocks ... why can't NASLite ?

Obviously, with this PCI card, NASLite can also see a RAID-1 ARRAY, but it thinks there's a 126GB physical limitation ...