NASLite Network Attached Storage

Before coming towords NL, I looked throught what there was on the "all is ready, plug and use" market and fell on QNAP 401 NAS server.

The nice thing about this box was that it used 2 gigabit lan connections simultaniously It could also balance load from one to the other in case one card was not working or connected.

As it seemed to use some Linux based program, I wondered if it was something NL could look in to. I know that NL is mainly for turning "old" computers in NAS servers but, who knows... maybe one day, we'll build a formula 1 NAS server using NL...

Regards

I would also like NL to incorporate more features. I realize Ralph and Tony like to cater to the n00bs, but even power users like a nice/simple interface to do a little more powerful stuff.

Im not asking for enterprise solutions, just like secure FTP access and other NAS-like features.

Hi Robby,

We did spend some time on the multiple network card issue during the initial design stages of NASLite-2. Such feature may be useful in the case of 10T or perhaps 100T, but with the availability of Gbit, the bottleneck becomes the read/write speed of the hard drives and not the NIC. In terms of reliability, odds of drive failure are considerably greater than the odds of a failed NIC. Therefore, multiple NICs will not contribute to the performance of the NAS and may actually have negative effect on throughput.

I think in its current state NASLite is pretty fast and will without a doubt qualify as an F1 compared to other options in the field.

Hi Tony,

Thanks for your fast answer. That is why I bought NL

As for speed, I have an Athlon64 3200+ with 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 800 RAM and Gigabit LAN onboard with 3 SATA2 drives in RAID5 but NL doesn't see the network chip . For the moment, I have a formula 1 but it is in the pit stop

I'll have to find a Gigabit NIC in order to see the speed but seems that none of my NIC / PCI card work with NL All the others that work are onboard chips on Mo/Bo already in use...

Best regards

NASLite-2 v2.05 has the ability to select first or last interface. If you have an on-board NIC and a PCI add-on NIC, you may have to set the first/last interface option (Network Config Section) to select the NIC to use. I'm not sure if that's the problem, but I suspect that it may be. Surely there is a loose PCI NIC you have laying around that will do fine with NASLite.

As far as the onboard RAID, I'm sure VIA uses software RAID, also known as fake RAID, where the RAID function is actually implemented by the associated drivers. NASLite-2 supports only true Hardware RAID. The VIA hardware that you have will behave as a standard SATA interface so you can use individual drives as mounted volumes.

I hope that helps...

Hi Tony,

I only have the onboard LAN for the moment.

The general chipset is NVIDIA nForce430/GeForce6100. Everything is included in the chip set: For RAID, the chipset is NVIDIA MCP61P and they add "NVIDIA MediaShield™ RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD span cross Serial ATA drives". I don't know if MediaShield translates as software RAID...

And the lan part is NVIDIA MCP61P built-in Gigabit MAC with external Attansic PHY

With all this, I don't know if it is a soft RAID or not, and if the LAN chipset can he "hacked" to work with NL.

If not, I'll be back to XP Pro SP2 and my son will get one of the PCs...

Best regards.