NASLite Network Attached Storage

Using 4NT (which usually works well)....but I can see from the time it's taking that I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Everything is switched gigabit.

This is more for use in the future so I don't get myself in this situation again This is a repetitive requirement here, so I must find a fix.


Ideas, suggestions, welcomed.

Tony, Ralph.....is there any way I can speed this up? Have deadlines, and have never used NASLite for such tasks before. Must get these documents moved so they can be worked on by multiple OCR machines.

I am not sure that any of us understand your problem. Are you simply saying that the small file transfer performance of NL is lacking when being hit by multiple clients?

If so then there is only one proper way to fix this and that is to use a hardware RAID card with a large cache and drives set in a RAID10 array. RAID5 has a performance hit due to the way it functions under the hood compared to RAID10. If all the machines are hitting a single drive on the NL box your performance will be less than stellar since the heads will be all over the place doing random writes.

Mike

Just mapped the server as a local drive via a commercial FTP product "Web drive" http://www.webdrive.com/....and the transfer speeds seem to have increased a hundredfold.

Wondering if this FTP performance is too good to be true, and if there are any "gotchas". I always remember FTP as being kinda slow.


Any ideas what I may be doing wrong with CIFS transfer? Or is this difference just "the way things are"?

None of this was ever noticed before because the other NASLites are used as Video servers, with consistently fast transfers. I now may be loading this thing up with 4mil+ small files.

FTP has no integrity check so you may want to rethink that and there is allot going on at the start of a transfer that will be a hit on the network. I would run a test and move a large number of small files from a client to the NL box and time it. Then do the same from the NL box to another client machine.

The video file server performance will be good as those are big sequential file transfers. Small file performance will be far worse, Look at RAID with a hardware caching controller to help with that.

Mike

Ugh...you're right. And I loose all the file timestamps.

http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/arti ... g/1259.htm

We have compared the performance of Windows* and Linux*-based CIFS* (Samba*) servers for digital media applications and found that the ext3*-based Linux server’s throughput was up to 53% lower than the Windows server’s

Not directly applicable (these are small files I'm struggling with)....but perhaps a Windows/Linux "gotcha"?

Your link point to an article comparing xp/ntfs and openfiler/ext3. I know for a fact that naslite knocks the socks off of openfiler, so i haven't got a clue what they are testing? Naslite too uses ext3, so the statement about ext3 being half as fast as ntfs is crap. Another thing is digital media and video are large files. Large files tend to fragment on ntfs unless sequentially written. Performance degrades with with fragmentation. Ext3 remains pretty much constant with less than 10% fragmentation after extended use. With proper caching and read ahead the filesystem should have little to do with performance.

If you are talking about slow directory listing and browsing because of the high file count, then that would be because Naslite lacks the windows indexing service. Not sure if that's what you are talking about.

Followup: It was the NIC. Removed the GA311, installed the PRO 1000/MT......all is well.