NASLite Network Attached Storage

I'm currently using OpenFiler as my NAS software, but I find their support model "difficult"... I ended up with them because I had hardware compatibility problems with Ubuntu server and FreeNAS.

I'm interested in NASLite for several reasons: having both Macs and PCs on my system, I would like to use AFP which in principle NASLite-2 supports; the gui based power management is more sophisticated than OF's; I can run it easily from USB Key; a downloadable manual is provided...etc. Now I'm wondering how easy it would be to change over to NASLite. Currently:

1. I've used no software RAID, only redundant partitions on different disks with redundancy maintained by rsync via crontab jobs.
2. I have one drive that I both boot from and have data on in ext3 format partitions, and another in mixed ext3/XFS formatted partitions (testing performance). OpenFiler uses LVM and these drives have been setup as such.

I can set up NASLite to USB, but how difficult would it be to integrate the data on these drives into an NASLite driven box? Would it make more sense to dump all this data temporarily to a large drive, make a new install and re-transfer or is it possible to use the drives as is?

Oh and while I'm here: are the Marvell Gig-E chips supported? Not one is listed in the hardware guide, and they've been pretty common since nForce2.

Thanks!

NL 2.0 is now a unified boot disk so you can build a CDROM, HDD, or USB booted system. The partition on the HDD is so small, I think less than 20MB, that that is the way I would go. The caviatt here is that in order to make the partition on the boot drive you will have to reformat the whole thing necessitating the removal of the data there in to a temp storage disk.

As far as migrating the drives to NL 2.0, you should just be able to boot the OS, configure it, and the drives with the EXT2/3 partitions should be exported. NL does not support the XFS partition so it will not be available on the network. You will have to move the data off of the partition and expand the EXT3 partition on that drive to take advantage of the space.

I don't know about the marvel GigE cards, I at present use a 3Com. In the past I have also used Dlink and Intel and a couple of different RealTek cards with great to good results.

Mike