NASLite Network Attached Storage

looking at upgrading to v2, and have just finished going thru the manual and forum but did not see any mention of naslite being hotswap compatible (although i did see recomended hardware which is hotswap)

So the big Question is can NasLite handle HotSwap ??

I guess that if you have a RAID5 or RAID 1 array, the RAID controller supports hot-swap and you have supported(by the RAID cntrlr) hot-plug drive bays then if you unplug a damaged drive and replace it with working one, the array still operates, even though in a degraded mode, the logical drive is still available to the OS and NASlite V2 is not even aware of the change.

In theory this is how it should be....

i was thinking along the lines of individual drives (non-raid) which could be swaped in and out at demand

Nope, you have to bring the box down as far as I know.

Mike

Hot swap in the context of a NAS is acceptable only in the case of RAID since if a drive is removed, the content of the volume is still available to all connected users. With individual drives, that is not the case and the content will no longer be available to connected users. In addition, when a single drive is removed, the associated services will have to be reconfigured and restarted on-the-fly as a response to the volume loss. That in turn will interrupt all connected users that happen to be using a particular service and not necessarily the lost volume. Generally, such approach will be a very bad idea in my opinion.

That is the reason NASLite does not allow for hot swapping of individual storage media. Although, one can physically remove a connected USB or FireWire drive while NASLite is powered, the results may be less than desirable especially is there are locked (in use) files on that drive. In the case of hardware RAID, on the other hand, that function is handled by the RAID card and has no effect on the operation of NASLite.

In theory, it is possible to design a system that allows for hot plugging individual NAS volumes, but the management code will be complex and potentially unstable given hardware diversity.

Hope that makes sense

it make sence, i was just hoping that with the advent of interfaces that support it (usb, sata, firewire) that maybe NAS2 was desigened also to do it.
but it was wishfull thinking.
thankyou all for your feedback