Hello everyone.
I have not been here for quite a while, but am checking out the NAS scene and options again, and naturally, NASLite has to be considered.
I have been playing with FreeNAS, but don't really like it for a number of reasons, one being that to use it's advanced filesystem thing, you have to have crazy amounts of RAM. I know there is the option of more standard RAM size and the lesser filesystem, but it also seems like things like the RAID thing are a bit dangerous in that if one drive dies, it breaks the whole array - probably why they suggest the advanced filesystem and heaps of RAM.
However, I tried it anyway(using lesser filesystem and less RAM), and although it worked OK, it was problematic to get running, involving user accounts and access permissions etc, so I have come back to NASLite to have a peek at it, mainly as I remember it as being very simple but effective, and also uses very little RAM by comparison.
Unlike in my earlier posts about being concerned with fsck, I now run my servers(whatever OS) 24/7 with UPS backup, so I don't shut them down unless the UPS does cos of a power cut, so that basically should deal to the fsck concerns as far as I am concerned.
I used to shut down the server every night, you see......
Anyway, can someone here just confirm for me, that you can setup NASLite-2 without any RAID at all, so that each disk is separate and unique? I am pretty sure you can, and looking at the screenshot under OVERVIEW in the NASLite-2 page, suggests that you can. I just want to make sure that RAID is not forced on you. Reason being, that if one drive dies - yes - you have lost that data, but you can plop another one in there, and then copy everything back to the new drive from the archive backups. In the meantime, you can get the server up and running again, so users can still access the data on the other working drives. If you break a RAID array, the whole thing is down while you rebuild the flippin' array. In my case, it is a media server, not so much a mission-critical data server, so at worst if a drive dies, you lose access to the media on that drive, until you can restore it, but until that time, you can still run the server with the remaining drives.
Hopefully, this is making some kind of sense......
Also, does NASLIte-2 support UPS's with USB shutdown commands A-La the Windoze thing - if the UPS is getting weak during power failure, it can signal the server to shutdown before the juice dies and the server has an unclean shutdown.
EDIT: I found the answer to the RAID thing in the manual, which I also found on the NASLite-2 page. Page 13 of the manual tells me that all disks are exported to the network as Disk-0 through to Disk-N, so that has answered that bit.
Still would love to hear if the UPS shutdown is supported - I will keep reading the manual for now...