NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi everyone,

I knew I ran a risk when I purchased a new drive last weekend, and my fears were realized tonight when I tried to install it.

Got a Seagate 2tb Barracuda on sale for $99 less a $10 coupon, so I snapped it up. My NASLite box currently only has a PATA 500gb drive in it, and I am way tight on space. I knew my MB supported 1.5gbs SATA, but it turns out the controller is a Via 8237R, which doesn't support auto speed negotiation, and the new drive is a 6.0gbps drive (I thought it was 3.0 and I could jumper it down to 1.5, but that's not the case).

The motherboard in the NAS only has PCI slots, so now I am trying to find a PCI controller card that will work with NASlite and my new hard drive. The manual for the drive says, "Barracuda drives with 6Gb/sec SATA are designed for easy installation. It is usually not necessary to set any jumpers on the drive for proper operation..." Under system requirements on the outside of the box it says, SATA 6Gb/s interface connector or motherboard or add in card (backward compatible to SATA 3Gb/s). I was looking at NewEgg and found a couple PCI cards that were SATAII compatible and the chipset was listed in the NASlite hardware reference, but anything PCI tops out at 1.5Gb/s (the drive says only backward compatible to 3.0Gb/s).

I don't care about the speed...I really just need the space, and would like to find a PCI controller that will work with NASlite and my new drive. Am I looking for the proverbial unicorn, or does what I want exist? Alternatively, I have a 2tb Barracuda Green drive I just put into a DVR expander that I think is only 3.0Gb/s. I could swap them, but wife and kids will probably not be happy about losing some of their recorded shows. I could pick up a new motherboard, but I didn't see anything that had SATA and would also let me keep my old PATA drive, so that starts to get more expensive than I had wanted.

Thanks,

Gary

i have had success with any card with a promise chipset - drives were older than yours so they may not work - but they do seem to be better than most

the alternative would be go the new motherboard route and pick up a pata card - again promise do a few variations

can you tell i like promise stuff

Hmmm...might be time for an upgrade. The cheapest Promise card I found was $55. For $159 I can get a refurbed Dell PowerEdge 840 that includes two 250gb SATA drives and has gigabit LAN (my current box is a home-built that only has megabit LAN). By the time I pick up a SATA controller and then later upgrade the LAN, I might as well spring for the new box. Unfortunately, I don't know what SATA controller it uses, so I could just be setting myself up for a new card anyways.

I will have to think a bit.

If speed is really not an issue you should consider trying the drive in an external USB case. The performance will suck but it should work. The caveat here is that you will need to upgrade to the latest version of NASLite.

Mike

I thought I'd post back and let everyone know what a doofus I am.

I decided to take the 2tb green drive out of my DVR expander since it is a 3gb/s drive that can be jumpered down to 1.5gb/s. I put it in, and it still didn't show up. It was then that I realized I wasn't seeing any SATA ports in the bios. I poked around and realized I couldn't find ANYthing related to SATA in the bios anywhere. I pulled up the motherboard manual and dug around, and it turns out the SATA controller wasn't enabled. Doh! The spot to enable it was buried down in a menu path I hadn't looked at while poking around.

I enabled it and put the new 6bgp/s drive back in. It was recognized right away and it's now formatted and ready to load up with all kinds of good stuff.

Even though my SATA chipset doesn't support auto speed negotiation the drive was able to manage. I had been looking around online and found all kinds of reviews for this drive saying folks had gotten it to work with 1.5, 3.0 and 6.0 gb/s controllers without doing anything, so it was bugging me that I couldn't see it at all anywhere in the bios when it was installed.

So looks like my cheapo $149 self-built NAS from 2007 will continue to live on (now I'm off to search for a gigabit NIC).

Take care,

Gary