NASLite Network Attached Storage

Just a quick test with NasLite proved to be a very Lite product indeed.

This is not intended as a bashing rather as shortcoming which I hope might be solved in the future. As it stands, NASLite 1 or 2 does not fullfill my needs.

These are in no particular order:

- Missing authentication. For all services, with local users and groups, A.D. is only required for Bussines users and home users should be fine with just local users.

- No web based management. Unable to administer the box using a webbrowser using http/https on a alternate port. many reboots required after configuration. Generate status pages on demand instead of generating them on interval. Add a meta refresh if required.

- No software raid support. This might seem weird for a home user, but people building a home NAS box are probably in the prosumer segment anyway. And Yes, I would want Raid 5. I need the performance in some cases and keep redundancy. I don't want to lose the important things _again_.

- Single disk write performance is _very_ low at 4 MB/s this is really weird since the read performance is up there with ~25MB/sec over Gigabit Ethernet. I am assuming write caches are disabled but even then a mere 10MB/s should be obtainable. This on different disks and machines.
It's not the network card perse as pushing 3 files at the same time equals about ~14-18MB/sec.

I am not sure what sort of development schedule is ahead in terms of upcoming releases. Some enlightenment would be nice.

For now it seems I'll have to poke at FreeNAS or have a poke at file management in pfSense. (Note: I am biased since I am a pfSense dev).

Cheers

Although I agree that for Business use, access control is mandatory, for home use, which is what I use NASLite for, I don't miss it at all.

As far as web management goes, it would be nice, but then again telnet is not that much of an inconvenience. I found that after thinking over the hardware configuration in advance and taking care of everything, reboots are minimal. I set v2 last night and had it up an running in a few minutes with just 2 reboots.

v2 has hardware raid support. I use a cheap 4port adaptec 2400a board for RAID5 and I am really impressed. I ve had bad experiences with software raid on windows boxes....

I find your performance issue strange. On mine I get 8Mb/s writes to the raid5 array and 7mb/s on a single disk in UDMA33 on a 100Mbit network.
The write cache is enable since it is clearly visible by observing the network monitor on a WinXP box which sends the files.