NASLite Network Attached Storage

Greetings. I am a new (very happy) user of NASLite+. I have a number of old PCs to choose from to use as a file server. What is the best choice I can make? Fastest CPU, most memory, gigabit card or 10/100 card? Does more RAM make a difference? How much is too much RAM (just never used)? Does an ethernet card have be "installed" in Windows first, or just inserted in a PCI slot and discovered by NASLite+? Thanks in advance for the assistance. Grumpa

I have tried it on a number of PCs, and the biggest performance difference come down to the IDE controller. Newer boards with ATA66,100,or 133 support perform much better than older boards. The software will bypass the controller to access large drives regardless of normal bios limitations, but transfer rates are chipset dependant.

CPU doesn't seem to affect performace in any noticeable way. In fact, I pulled a faster PIII in favor of a passively cooled celeron 333 in one of mine. It was designed to run on old hardware.

A gigabit card might make a difference if you have a Gigabit switch, depending on the performance ceiling of your hard drive controller. Older controllers can't seem to saturate a 10/100 link.

Tony has said in other posts that ram usage is about 2mB/concurrent user, so whatever you have is probably more than enough.

lusid ... thanks for the informative reply. Can I assume from your notes that I can seat an ATA66, 100, or 133 controller card in one of these old PCs and that would be recognized at NASLite+ boot? Thanks.

If your talking about a PCI IDE adapter card then no NASlite won't recognise it, it only works on the motherboards onboard IDE channels and then I think only for 4 devices 3 hdd and the cdrom. The only problem I have had is with my motherboards IDE speed, I have been trying to stream High Def movies to my HTPC and basically the IDE controller can't cope with the network speed, but bare in mind I am running a full 1GBPS network, a 100MBPS card and system didn't have any problems streaming MP3's or standard ripped dvd video. As far as installing the network card goes all you do is physically install it into a PCI slot and then NASlite recognises it. You can't add windows based drivers but you don't need them anyway.
Have fun and post back if you get any problems, the guys on this forum are the most helpful I've come across

Thank you "lusid" and "wilbur" ... very helpful and informative responses ... much appreciated.
Jim (Grumpa)

Hi Wilbur,

I was just wondering, What do you view your high def movies on?

Eden

Hi edeng,

I have a media PC in the lounge rigged up to my amp and a 42" plasma as the display. I use "videolan" http://www.videolan.org as the player it's free, but I also use Power dvd 6 it just struggles more than video lan with streaming from the network.

I'm cheating really though I force the High Def through the VGA input of my plasma screen at 1024 x 768, I was too eager with the plasma and bought a Panasonic P7 which isn't compatible with HDMI or DVI inputs that fully support the High Def standards of 720i or 1080i, but even with that in mind the high def stuff looks really good on my plasma once you set the interlacing up correctly IMHO it's a better picture than standard dvd. A friend of mine has a Hitachi fully High Def compatible plasma and the HD stuff connected properly via DVI looks absolutley superb on that, it's like looking through a window not at a screen, if you think back to the first cd you listened to compared to a vinyl disk that is what true high def is like compared to dvd it really is that good.

When HD tv via SKY kicks off in the UK next year the plan is to upgrade my plasma to the P8HD Panasonic which is basically the same screen but is fully HD compatible, and change the amp to one that can upscale and switch the video input to a HDMI or DVI signal

To get an idea try downloading some of Windows HD clips, they're reallly good and give you a great demonstration of what HD looks like, anyone with Windows MP10 and a monitor that can display 1024 x 768 can view true HD images