NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi everyone. I just got NASLite-2 USB today and got it all setup with 5 HD's for 1 terabyte of storage (no RAID or anything). One of my drives was bad (I knew it was going bad so no surprise), so I ended up with the following share names:
Disk-0
Disk-1
Disk-3
Disk-4

To my surprise, when I removed Disk-2 -- the bad drive -- the other shares were remapped, so now I have:
Disk-0
Disk-1
Disk-2
Disk-3

In other words, Disks 3 and 4 had their share names decremented by 1. This is a major problem for any program that stores full paths to files located on the shares. Not only would I lose all the files on the failed hard drive Disk-2, but all the files that were on disk-3 and disk-4 would essentially become inaccessible without rewriting all the stored paths.

Am I missing something? Isn't there any way to associate a share name with a particular drive and have the share name stay intact if an upstream drive is removed?

Nope, you got it right. That's the way it works with NASLite and the drive mapping, there is no way to change this.

Mike

Ok Thx for the fast reply.

I guess i'll have to add a level of indirection by mapping a bunch of drives to the NASLite-2 machine, and saving stuff through the drive mappings. That way if I lose an NASLite-2 drive and it changes it's shares, I can reverse its changes by modifying my drive mappings. ick.

Those are the limits we have to deal with for the added stability and simple setup of the product. I am sure that Tony and Ralph will tell you it ain't perfect but it goes like hell and just keeps running.

Mike

normally i would agree but i would say this feature/bug/quirk is pretty fundametal in any real world installation.

i.e. you shouldnt have to go around and fix all your clients if you add a disk to your NAS. Thats counter intuitive to the premise of NASLite being simple to operate

This has been discussed before and heavily analyzed during beta. Having unique disk names based on the port that the disk is connected, as found with NASLite v1, is fine when a limited number of disks can be connected. NASLite+ will explicitly number disks as Disk-1, 2, 3 and 4 for IDE 00, 01, 10, 11 respectively. Now imagine the task of similarly naming disks in NASLite-2. NASLite-2 supports IDE, SATA, SCSI, RAID(IDE/SATA/SCSI), USB and FireWire disks in any order or combination up to 128 total volumes. Not an easy task at all. The only way that it can be done is with the use of a lookup table. That approach is inferior and carries a much higher potential for problems.

Hi Tony. Thx for the reply.

As a programmer myself, I don't quite understand how the addition of a single lookup table creates a much higher potential for problems. Are you talking about share name collisions or something?

If someone has a NASLite-2 machine with 128 volumes, and volume 1 fails, how do you anticipate people to fix their access to the remaining 127 volumes whose share names have all decremented by 1? I'm not having a go at you, i'm genuinely asking in case there is some obvious way around my concern. thx

turtle

I agree that the scenario that you are describing, although unlikely, will be a bother. Personally, I’d replace the faulty drive, bringing the count back to the previous state. That aside, within the context of NASLite-2, how would you handle the naming of storage disks?

Hi Tony. Yes I agree my scenario is an extreme case, but I could envision a minor version of that happening to me. I'd need to RMA the hard drive, and wouldn't get a replacement for a few weeks. This would mean my shares are muddled up for the duration...but I can workaround this as I described above.

Anyway, in terms of naming the disks, it would be wonderful if there was an option to rename the share from the default. I realize this would add a layer of complexity, but maybe it could be manageable by punishing the user for their arrogance. If you activate share renaming, the price you pay is you must assume full control over disk/share naming from that point forward. In this mode, when you remove a drive, NASLite-2 would leave all share names as is. When you add a drive, it would prompt you for a name.

Oh and since I haven't said this yet, I think this is an *awesome* product.
I was surprised how easy it was to setup, and the performance is impressive.