NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hiya,

I recently had a hard drive failure at home and lost one of my 250gb drives which actually held my entire MP3 collection (70% i will never get back as they were rips of my obscure vinyl collection!), as well as photos taken over the past 5 years (girlfriend has hit the roof). So I have decided to plan for all eventualities, and go for a RAID setup running from a NAS.

I am hopefully planning on building a dedicated pc that sits as a file server to host media for a HTPC i'm in the process of building, to serve files around the home network. Eventually i want to do this wirelessley but I guess I ill have to make do with ethernet for now. I have been looking at NASLite+ and it seems to do the job I want to. However I have been told to steer away from software RAID as if there are any power failures it could in effect ruin the whole array? Is this true or is it as safe as a hardware based RAID setup?

As I'm a n00b I have a few questions.

1) Can I start with a RAID 1 array and when NASLite 2.x is released, either upgrade the array to a RAID 0+1 (01) or a RAID 1+0 (10) array?

2) Can I add more hard drives to a RAID 5 array as time and money permits? Or do I have to start the array with the amount of drives I want from scratch?

3) If I upgrade my system and transport the drives to a hardware based RAID system at a later date, will I be able to continue as I was using NASLite+ or will I essentially lose the array?

Cheers guys!!

The current version of NASLite doesn't support any version of RAID.

What you could do with the current version of NASLite is backup your drives so you have 2 copies of everything. You would either have to manually copy files or use a backup program.

Sorry,

I meant does NAS support hardware RAID, for example if I had a RAID array set up on my motherboard's RAID controller, would NAS see it correctly?

Not in version 1.x. Coming in version 2 though.

I hope you still have the drive that failed, if you do then the data can be recovered fairly easly if you don't have an HDA failure. If it is the electronics on the board you can get the same drive and swap the board. This does work and will allow you to recover the data. Keep in mind that the boards are tuned to the HDA on whitch they are installed but should work. I have done this a half a dozen times and it has worked. DO NOT SEND THE DRIVE IN FOR REPLACEMENT OR YOUR DATA WILL BE LOST!

The other option is to just send it out to a data recovery house, not cheap ($1000.00 USD) but better than loosing the data.

Mike