NASLite Network Attached Storage

FYI: Belkin F5U503 Firewire Card works. Be advised (and maybe just my setup) ... I had to re-boot NASLite v2 3 times before it first "saw" the firewire drive, then it forgot it for 3 more re-boots, and then like magic it fondly welcomed it into the server for good. Also on the first boot after adding the card, it took a l - o - n - g time to start up as it mused over the new addition.

NASLite-2 is very straightforward in the way it handles FireWire. On boot, the kernel will render the interface. On init, the auto-configuration checks for the presence of FireWire hardware and subsequently, disks attached via FireWire. At that point, if disks are found, the auto-configuration will rescan the SCSI bus to render the proper inodes for those drives.

If your hardware has IRQ problems it may be slow to respond. If you have a bad cable/connectors, etc., you’ll also see a delay. If the enclosure is underpowered, again, you may see a delay. The delay generally means that things are not healthy and problems may be close behind.

One way to eliminate IRQ problems is turn “PnP OS” OFF in the bios, that way the BIOS will allocate all IRQs as necessary before NASLite-2 takes control.

Generally, external drives are not a good idea as NAS devices, but are convenient, so use them with caution.

Hope that helps shed some light on the process.

Tony: Thanks for the insight. I should probably mention that since the Firewire drive has been formatted, the boot process is quick with no glitches ... it was just the initial birthing process that took time. I am curious why you said; "Generally, external drives are not a good idea as NAS devices, but are convenient, so use them with caution". Why not a good idea? And please, what cautions?
Thanks.

Grumpa, I guess it could be the handling of the device, remember the gyro scope, picking up a spinning disk is not a good thing. also the device could be knocked over or dropped.

As a general rule, externally attached USB or FireWire drives provide much lower performance than optimized interfaces (IDE, SATA, SCSI, etc.). Having multiple drives on a single USB/FW interface is even slower. In addition, the hardware (enclosures, connectors, etc.) tends to be of lower quality.

That said, there is nothing wrong with using external drives. The convenience alone is worth it as long as external drives are treated with care.

Firewire (particularly the 800 version) seems to offer the ideal means to expand a storage system. You simply add up to 64 drives to the bus (perhaps augmenting with hubs for reliability)?

Of course the only area where this falls down is cost. Those promise IDE 4 disk controller sre pretty cheap....so if NASLite supports them - that would be the way to go.