NASLite Network Attached Storage

Do you have an aprox time for producing a version that will work with more than 4 hard drives via either built in ide ports on the m/board or via extra ports on a pci card.
many thanks and regards

Well,

I'm not making any promises - - but that is scheduled for the 2.X bransches. The 1.X branches will remain very close to what you see right now. Mainly, within the 4M ramdisk limit.

Is the 2.X branch planned for a 3Q05 release or is there no timetable set for the next revision branch?

Mike Zemina

Will raid be in the next version? When will it be released? What new features will be included?

I eagerly await the arrival of NASLite+ 2.x (and hope the upgrade path won't be too costly for those of us who recently purchased ver. 1.2 -- hint, hint).

Right now, the machine I am using for my server (200 Mhz PII, 128 MB RAM) has UDMA33 IDE ports on the motherboard. I did a speed test and found that transferring data from my old laptop to the NAS server (via 100 Mbps ethernet using a switch) was about 65% *slower* than copying data from the laptop to an external USB hard drive (and the laptop is USB 1.1, *not* 2.0). Even transferring data from my laptop to a shared drive on my Windows 2000 desktop over the same network takes about the same amount of time as it does to copy it to the USB hard drive -- about 40% less time than it takes to copy it to the NAS server. Right now, it takes almost 3 1/2 hours to transfer about 3.8 GB of data from my laptop to the NAS server over the network.

I'm wondering what the limiting factor is:

Is it the network (100 Mbps)? Would I see better transfer speeds over a gigabit network?

Is it the hard drive (at UDMA33)? Would I see improvement if I was able to use the installed PCI IDE card at UDMA66 (or even better at UDMA133)?

Is it the RAM on the NAS server? Would I see improvement with more RAM?

Any thoughts?

The problem is not RAM. 128M is more than enough. My first bet will be the NIC, but IDE or cabling may also be the cause. For comparison, a friend uses an old GW P120 with 48M RAM and 2x160G drives at UDMA33, Inexpensive RTL NIC on a 10/100 switched network. The transfer speeds are between 50% and 60% of peek capacity.