NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi all,

I have had my NasLite box for about a year now, and I am upgrading the setup I currently have. I have sold all my old drives on to a friend and I am using the money to put towards buying 4x 500Gb SATAII drives, hopefully putting them into a RAID 5 using the Adaptec 2410SA card I have to provide 1.5Tb storage.

At the moment I have backed up all my NasLite data onto a borrowed 4Tb F/S from work, so I will be starting from scratch. At the time of upgrade I can only afford 3x drives so will need to add more disks later and expand the array.

I'm not too sure about the steps I need to take, so was looking for advice (and a guiding hand!). Could someone please look over the steps below and tell me if its right or not?

1) Connect all drives to controller in pc and boot up.
2) Enter Adaptec BIOS and create array of 3x drives in a RAID 5 config. (I don't know if I have to select a stripe size, 16,
32, and 64 KB [default] - Advice please! - My NAsLite box will hold Video, photos & MP3's, so varying file sizes from 0-12mb per MP3 file, 0-8Mb per photo, and 0-1.4Gb per video file.).
3) (Not too sure if I need to set the new RAID5 array to bootable or non-bootable - Advise please!)
4) Reboot system and instal NasLite
5) Not too sure about following steps for first install - please advise.


Now for expanding my array I have no idea!! I have read elsewhere on here that I could do it, but I need to expand the array in the BIOS for the card, then boot into a Linux CD, and expand the partition to make use of the extra space, then restart NasLite upon reboot. Is this correct, or if anyone could give me a bit more detail that would be great!!

Sorry for all these (what may seem simple and probably trivial) questions, but I am still getting to grips with this, and being extremely cautious as I want to retain all my very important data!! - DV & Images of recently departed family members).

Cheers guys!

I set up the adaptec 2610SA a while back. It was my first RAID5 setup. I do not remember exactly what I did but it was not very difficult. I did have to go into the adaptec setup to build the array first. I left most options at the default. After the array was built it rebooted and NASLite recognized it as one large drive. I then did the format under NASLite and made it RW.
I too am curious about how to expand this array as I am filling up my 3 disk array.

Generally the RAID cards have built into the BIOS utility tools for "Expanding" the array/s. You would simply bring down the NAS box, in a graceful way of course. Install the new drive/s. Boot the box and go into the RAID card utility and follow the directions for adding the drive to the array. Most modern controllers have the ability to add storage to the array on the fly in the background, likely yours does as well.

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR DATA BEFORE "F"ing AROUND WITH AN ARRAY, ONE MISTAKE AND YOUR DATA WILL BE LOST WITH NO REASONABLE RECOVERY POSSIBLE!!!!!

Mike