NASLite Network Attached Storage

Have a couple of friends that were impressed by the NAS we have serving our video and audio files. They had an old Compaq PIII 933 with 256MB of RAM laying around and so I had them buy M2 and built them a NASLite box. So far I have done a transfer test of over 1.3TB of data with not one issue save Windows choking on a file name with a diacritic in it.

They should be very happy together for years to come. Good job again guys!

Mike

So the machine got a test run before delivery and considering that it was an oldish Compaq machine the performance was not to bad. It's a PIII 933MHz with 256MB of RAM. Since the MB had only ATA I had to add a SATA card. Since the on board NIC was only a 100Mb I also added a Gigabit NIC. Both are on the same PCI bus so max performance was not in the cards for this one. Overall though the performance was not bad at all. Sustained reads and writes were in the 27MB/sec range.

The above machine needed a SATA card and since there were no cards local we waited on it in the mail. Meanwhile I used another machine I had just sitting in the corner of the basement to install NASLite on. The machine is a P4 at 2.66GHz and a gig of RAM. The on board NIC is only 100Mb so I added a Gigabit NIC. Since the motherboard has a 1x PCIe slot I installed a Marvel based NIC. SATA was the on board ports off of the chipset. It ran a respectable rate in the low 50MB/sec range for both reads and writes. The drive was a new 2TB Seagate SATA at 5400RPM. The differences in performance are much more likely to do with the limits of the bus that the SATA and the NIC run on on the Compaq than the processor and/or the memory.

Overall excellent performance in both cases when you take into account the differences in hardware and the limits they bring to the table.

Mike