NASLite Network Attached Storage

Is there a recommended high performance, low cost card that I can purchase on eBay that you guys are happy with? I'll settle with a 4-port that supports RAID 0 and JBOD, although I'd like more ports.

I've been using NL for at least three years, but I need to increase the size of these volumes without replacing all my disks. I've been researching other solutions that provide software RAID but if I can maintain NL without much more expense I'd prefer it.

Software Raid will be supported soon No dates yet, but I'm working on it.

Yesss !

Hi Ralph.

Will software RAID work on any hardware or should the MB support software RAID in order for NL to be able to use it? If it is the second option, should RAID be set in the BIOS or will NL bypass BIOS to use the RAID? And last question, RAID 0, 1, 5, ... ?

I won't go on asking too many questions so that you can go on working on programing

Any hardware.

Either the LSI MegaRAID i4 or the 3Ware 7500-4 should suit your needs (although the 7500-4 uses a 64-bit PCI-X slot it also works in a 32-bit PCI slot). I have used the i4 and a 7500-8 to good effect.

I have a few of the LSI MegaRAID i4 cards and have tested them using a few old Maxtor drives, the performance was good, not great, but good in RAID0. I will add a link later to the performance run of diskwriggler with the configuration. If you like I will part with a card or two for real cheap.

So here is the link to a capture of the run of one of the LSI cards running in RAID0 with 3 of the 120GB Maxtor ATA drives. These are old drives with little cache and slow rotation speeds. The drives were on different channels each, though another test showed little difference in writes or reads with 2 drives on one channel. The interface on the controller is 100MB/sec ATA.



Still not bad performance considering. I would be interested in the performance of one with a few of the more modern ATA drives at 7200RPM and large cache.

Mike

I am using a LSI LOGIC MegaRaid i4 PCI card in a P4 2.53GHZ 512MB Box.

I picked it up on eBay for a pretty cheap price if I remember right. I'm using it in a RAID 1 (Mirror) on 2 500GB drives and it works just fine. I did have a problem at first when it would not recogonize the 500GB drives and would only format that at 184G I think. With help from folks here on the system, I flashed the BIOS on the card and that fixed it.
Do a search of my username and you should see the thread.