NASLite Network Attached Storage

I have Naslite HDD running on two PCs. One is a data server, the other is a backup.

The dataserver is a home made PIII with a 500G PATA drive. The NIC is a generic no-name gigabit card called a NIC-T3 based on a Realtek chipset.

The backup is a second hand Dell GX-270 running a 2.4Ghz P4 with 750G SATA drive and onboard Gigabit LAN. The Dell came with a 30G PATA drive, but I removed that and replaced it with the 750G SATA drive - the SATA cables were already in place, so it was a straight forward plug in.

I use the PIII as a dataserver on my home network. I use the Dell to backup the dataserver, plus a media player, a laptop and another desktop.

The problem I have is that the Dell is very slow compared to the PIII. It takes far longer to boot up than the PIII. Despite having a faster/more modern CPU, motherboard, hard drive, etc.

Anyone any ideas why this is ?

Many thanks,

Des.

Have you turned off (in BIOS) all of the motherboard devices that are not required for the machine to perform as a server? It could be as simple as an IRQ conflict.

define "slow"


for a point of information, i have a similar dell, and it takes about 80 seconds or so to boot up. i have no other NASLite machines to compare it to, but since i never shutdown, and the NAS is on a UPS, boot time is really a non-issue for me.

Also look for a quick boot option. Check the logs as well for NL as they may hold clues as to what is happening to cause the long boots.

Dells suck anyway and there is allot of crap that goes on in the more modern PC compared to the older ones.

Mike

Thanks for the responses.

I will check out the bios for unnecessary stuff and let you know if that make any difference.

I'll do some timings to measure how long it takes the two machine to boot from cold. That'll give an indication of how much slower the Dell is. I'll also copy some data to and from the two to see how/if transfer rates vary.

Watch this space.

Des.

As promised here are some boot timings.

From hitting the on button to the login: prompt appearing on screen,

Dell GX270 - 8 minutes 40 seconds
Home made PIII - 1 minute 5 seconds !!!!!!!!!

I then tried to copy data from each Naslite machine to my Win XP PC using copy and paste in Windows Explorer. I copied an identical folder containing 35.1M in 189 files from each machine to separate folders on the hard drive on the Windows PC.

Del GX270 - 1 minute 15 seconds
Home made PIII - 7 seconds !!!!!!

Surely there is something amiss on the Dell ?! I can't understand why a P4 running a 750G SATA drive is so much slower than a PIII running a 500G PATA drive. Even when using Windows Explorer to navigate through the folders (I have drives mapped to each Naslite machine) the Dell pauses for one or two seconds after each click, whereas the PIII is just like looking at the local hard drive it is that fast.

Can anyone give me any clues?

Many thanks,

Des.

My guess is that there is at the least an IRQ conflict. You still need to post your logs after boot so we can get some idea of what is going on. There is also a big chance that the drivers of the NIC and SATA controllers on the Dell are not working correctly. You should not be getting boot times like that on the dell. There is something wrong. Are you shutting the Dell down properly? It almost sounds like the thing is doing a disk check before allowing access.

By the way, even if the Dell was running tip top you would see little if any difference in the two as far as performance. The processor is not that big a factor in the performance of the NAS. More RAM, a good NIC, and drive controller are the real performance boosters.

Mike

Sorted it !

Went into the BIOS and went through all the options. I changed quite a few so I'm not sure which single thing made the difference (I know all those years messing with PCs, have I learned nothing ?).

Significant change was to switch off as many of the IDE features as possible. When I get the machine it had a 30g IDE PATA drive, I took that out and put in the 750g SATA drive (all the sockets and cables were already there). It worked when I powered it up, so I didn't think about changing the BIOS settings. It wasn't until I was getting such poor performance that I noticed that something was wrong.

I also changed the graphics options to use the on board graphics - there is no graphics card, so I don't know what it thought it was using !

Whatever made the difference, the lesson is to go into the BIOS as part of your Naslite build and switch off whatever the machine doesn't need.

Many thanks to those who responded - especially NickC for suggesting I check the BIOS. I hope others can benefit from this.

BTW Boot time since the BIOS changes went from 8 mins 40 sec to just 45 seconds !!!

Many thanks,

Des.

glad to hear you got it sorted!