NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi everyone.

I currently have a NASLite box which has done me well for the past year. I have an old Compaq Desktop PIII 800Mhz with 2x 200Gb IDE HD's in it and 10/100 NIC. This has been great for me to store loads of video and audio as well as data for my home network, but since I have installed a Media Centre, added a laptop and setup my own business (very busy year!), I have decided to upgrade my NASLite. I am without any doubt buying the NASLite-2 USB version, and have got some new hardware for it.

1x ASRock P4VM890 - Socket 478 Mobo
1x Intel CeleronD 320 - 2.4Ghz CPU
2x 256Mb DDR RAM
1x 10/100 NIC
1x Adaptec 2410SA - 4 port SATAII RAID Controller
2x Seagate 500MB SATAII Hard Drives.
1x Case with a 4x bay SATA Backplane.

Now I wanted to start off with a RAID array, and was considering the RAID 5 option, but would mean me loosing one drive to parity. As I'm looking at expanding the array as I get more drives I thought this would be problematic as each time I would have to do the usual expand the partition using another distro etc etc and I have not skills in unix / linux at all!! So I decided to steer clear of this. I did however think about creating a RAID 0 array with the drives I have at the moment giving me 1TB storage. I was then considering of adding a further 2x identical drives in a few months time, and changing the array from RAID 0, to RAID 0+1 or 10 to give me the redundancy I require.

My question(s) is(are)...

i) Has anyone done this previously?

ii) Since the size of the partition will not be changing, will I have to change anything in regards to NASLite-2 or will it see the new RAID array exactly as the previous? (It hasn't changed in size, only added redundancy). I know I will have to use the Adaptec BIOS array tools to expand the array etc.

iii) would anyone suggest which I should choose between the RAID 0+1 or 10 arrays? I have checked online for answers but no-one seems to have a valid argument for choosing one or the other?

iv) would I be able to add a few more IDE drives to this setup later? And would it see the RAID array as one disk, then these as additional individual disks?

Well I hope that is enough for you tech heads to be chewing on! lol I hope you can answer my questions!

Many thanks for taking time to read this!

Phil

Hello Phil:

I don't have the expertise to answer your questions in detail; I will leave that to more experienced RAID forum members ("tech heads" as you call them). But I do have a suggestion, which also triggers its own question to whomever can answer this.

How about using the MIRROR function ? Instead of adding the RAID-1 functionality, why not use the built-in RSYNC MIRROR ? But that causes me to ask ... is this possible ? I have not (yet) used RAID with NASLite, so ... is it possible to just add a single large disk (matching the total capacity of the RAID-0 disks) to make a MIRROR of the array data (while avoiding the RAID BIOS tweaking) ?

Georg

Hi,

thanks for your reply. I think I understand what you mean. Do you mean having a RAID 0 array (striped) for speed, and then add a further 2x drives later (again striped in RAID 0 so I will have 2x RAID 0 arrays), and then use NASLite-2 to use the R-sync MIRROR function to backup array 1 to array 2?

I can see your point, the only problem is that if there was to be a failure in either array, I would lose any data that wasn't backed up since the last backup if you get me. If I had a RAID 0+1 or 10 setup, the data would be backed up as it is written.

Thanks for your input though!

Phil

Yeah, you almost got it. What I was advocating is less complexity (and cost) ... I am still not a fan of RAID (although, in response to my last time uttering this feeling, a forum user (fordem) -- correctly -- reminded me and everyone of the benefits). Your 1 TB array is hard to "Mirror" (which is what RAID-1 does), unless you have an identical setup, and is best done in hardware (which adds more cost). Your original proposal (and the questions that go along with it) is, however, definitely the ideal solution (0+1). And if NASLite can do that, go ahead. I was interested in finding out whether it is possible to use a single disk (would have to be 1TB in your case, but I was thinking of mirroring a 2x250 RAID-0 array with a single non-RAIDed 500GB) and the built-in mirror function. You are correct, unless you are doing real-time RAID-1 you could lose the last 24 hours worth of changes, but I think of NAS more as a warehouse of infrequently changing data.

Enough of the theory though ... what I actually do is to have a second server that mirrors the critical disk on my main server using NASLite's built-in rsync. (The second server only runs 1 hour per day, automatically woken up and shutdown from a WinXP system via TaskManager.)

You are correct, RAID-0 for speed (but then you should also invest in Gigabit NIC) and RAID-1 for safety. Hope the "tech heads" can answer your questions (and mine) ...

Georg