NASLite Network Attached Storage

I am also jumping on the RAID5 bandwagon and while I am waiting for my Adaptec 2400A card to arrive I 've been making some thoughts on how to configure things.

Initial configuration will be 3x300Gb drives RAID 5. This should give a logical drive of about 550Gb that NASlite v2 should see and be able to format.

Later on when an extra 300Gb drive is added and the logical drive is expanded to approx 825Gb, I am not sure how will NASlite see the change and how to go about making the space available. Is there something that can be done to extend the format so that the Naslite mounted disk can grow in size or will there need to be an additional logical disk?

Perhaps Tony or someone else that has tried this can shed some light on this....

I 've been searching for information on this and it seems that at least for some cards like the adaptec, OCE is only available for NTFS filesystems.

Linux based fs pre 2.6 seems to be not be able to handle OCE.

So at the moment, with the lack of further info it seems to me that RAID controllers that offer OCE are not worth investing in.

Going for an 8/12 port controller may only make sense if all disks are installed from the start in RAID 5 or in batches of 3-4 disks at a time creating separate logical volumes. This increases the drive cost though...

To avoid the frustration I experienced when trying to set up the above RAID card, don't bother trying to install this RAID card until Tony releases an update to NasLite 2 - there is no driver for the Adaptec 2400A in the first release of NasLite 2 (current version), wait for 2.01.

Thanks for the reminder! I saw your troubles but forgot them in my excitement

Concerning OCE and NASLite.

NL2 see's the raided drives as one logical drive, essentially what you'll have to do is add a drive thru your hardware card (provided it supports OCE) and then manually use GNU Parted (Linux Rescue CD) to expand the existing logical partition.

There is no way for NL2 to do this automatically, infact this is the precedure Dell suggests for expanding their linux based hardware raid servers.

So, yes, it will work, but not automatically.