NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hey everyone,

I recently installed NASLite-2 with an "old" P4 2.4GHz attached to a fairly generic three-year-old ASUS motherboard.
The mobo has no onboard support for serial ATA drives so I purchased one of these, for fairly cheap:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124020

The motherboard also doesn't have gigabit ethernet so I've connected a Netgear GA311 and have successfully connected that to the network.

I've connected two 500GB Seagate drives to the controller and am using the daily copy/clone feature of NASLite to copy one drive to the other.

I've attempted via Macs and PCs to use DiskWriggler, with speeds only showing about 10MB/s at the highest. I'm curious to know if you think anything in my setup might be incorrect? I've heard the read/write speed should be much faster.

One thing I did notice is that in connecting the GA311 up, the indicator on my gigabit switch doesn't indicate it's a gigabit connection? Is there someone with the GA311 that can confirm that the card works, or that I might need to do something to my BIOS or something? Thanks in advance.

If your gigabit nic is running in 100Mbit mode that would explain the "low" numbers. I had a similiar issue where my Intel NIC would be forced to run at 100Mbit rather than 1000Mbit but after switching ports back and forth in my switch this was resolved. The same port with the same cable detected 1000Mbit fine 100% of the time when my workstation was hooked up which confused me but as the problem was resolved I didn't spend too much time trying to figure it out.

The GA311 should work fine btw, I believe Ralph even uses one of these in one of his boxes. On my system (see signature for specs) I'm getting 25MB/s which also seem low for the setup but I've been unable to identify the bottleneck as of yet.

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll try this out when I get back next week and let you know!

FYI,

If you are trying to make a gigabit link work and it refuses to bump to 1000Mbps then make sure you have a good quality CAT5e cable or even better a CAT6 between all the nics and the switch. Also some cheap cables have only two pairs rather than the four pairs needed for a gigabit link. Cabling is the number one reason that gigabit hardware fails to negotiate to 1000Mbps and drops back to 100Mbps. It has been said again and again but you need to turn off and disable EVERYTHING that is not needed for the NAS function in the BIOS. Remember, simple is good and fast.

Mike