NASLite Network Attached Storage

Just another quick post from me to say that I'm loving NASLite+. A few months back I bought a Netgear SC101 and after quite a few weeks discovering how dreadful it was I looked for another solution. NASLite+ was what I found and I've had not a moment's trouble with it since.

You can read my review of the SC101 at http://www.epinions.com/content_219647348356.

Now if I had one wish for version 2 of NASLite it would be for real disk mirroring in software. I understand that version 2 will support hardware mirroring but I don't really see the point of that when it can be done just as well in software and there is already a Linux module that provides the facility. I don't ever expect to be taking my disks out of my NASLite+ server and carrying them to my friend's house so I find your desire for total portability of disks to be unnecessarily typing you hands.

Great job so far. Can't wait to see what's next.

John

If you've had experience setting up and using software mirroring (which I prefer to call OS driven mirrors), you would recognise that it would complicate things tremendously.

Part of the complication is removed by the fact that NASLite does not boot from the disks, but there would still be the need to create tools to manage the mirrors - creation, monitoring, failure notification, resynchronizing, etc.

Opting to provide mirroring through hardware has the potential to reduce this to simply a matter of incuding the appropriate driver support, since many (if not all) of the above functions can be handled by the card's BIOS.

There are also performance issues and additional buffer memory requirements that have the potential to push your minimum hardware requirements up.

Software mirrors may be as simple as duplicated writes in principle, but in reality there is so much more.

I do have experience of setting up software mirroring. And yes I get that it's complicated.

I still want it, though.

If it were available in a separate version of NASLite (in much the same way as the USB key version of NASLite) then customers would have the choice depending on whether their hardware was up to the task.

John

(building a fence to sit on)

Whist I see the benifits of Hardware and Software RAID support, I can see that it introduces a technical element that may conflict with the values/goals of the Software.

The original goals of the software (from what I understand) deliver a low cost network storage solution for the mass market (newbies and geeks incluslive) which could run on a varying hardware specifications. I can start to see that if too much is supported then areas such as program cost or support might be unduly affected. I appreciate and understand that we should keep up with the evolving currents of the industry, however I'm of the position "if it ain't broke why fix it".

I kow Tony/Ralph/invited others are testing V2.x of NASLite and it may be a good idea if we start a threat with our wishlist. I know there are scattered threads on all forums, but to collectivly dump this knowledge into one would be nice and make it wasier for the developers to work with our ideas.

(jumps down from soap box)

T.

Actually as I understand it they plan on supporting hardware RAID by supporting certain RAID controller cards. I find this surprising since it brushes aside the old notion of this running on any old hardware. Suddenly I'm into having to buy specific hardware for my NASLite box.

It seems to me that offering software RAID as an option would return us to the world of using otherwise defunct hardware.

On the other hand the Server Elements guys seem to like the idea of not storing a lot of configuration and I like that too. But really if Windows can import a software RAID set from a dead machine then why not NASLite?

The fact is that my old hardware isn't so very old that it can't run Windows 2000 Server. And with that I get all the capabilities of NASLite plus a lot more.

John

That's also going to cost you a lot more - the license fee to Microsoft for starters and don't forget to include a good antivirus