NASLite Network Attached Storage

I've been looking to set up a home NAS solution for a while since the number of my digital photos, DVD backups, and various digital video recordings are growing fast.

Having done some research I believe that going the NASLite+ way is the way to go for me. I already have an old machine with everything I need. The only things I would need to add would be hard drive(s) and possibly gigabit networking. Thus my questions.

Firstly, I just want to confirm that adding a new hard drive won't cause the one(s) already in there to lose the data. What I mean is that adding a new hard drive would not be causing a complete reconfiguration of the system, right?

Secondly, I already have a network card to use. But that's a 10/100 card. My desktop and notebook both have gigabit cards. If I decide to go ahead, and get a gigibat NIC for NASLite+ server (I would have to also get a gigabit switch so all machines with gigabit connections utilize the higher speed), will I have to completely reconfigure NASLite+ server since a key hardware component changed? And once again, will this cause any loss of data?

Lastly, having read the documentation I believe that there's no limit of 4GB transfer for NASLite+. However, having gone through the messages on this forum, I believe I saw one where a user said that (s)he ran into an issue with the file greater than 4GB. So, is there this limit?

Thanks a lot,

-- Alex

Ok I'll answer what I can.

Yes you can add another disk to a NASLite+ server without affecting the other disks already in the system. There is very little in the way of configuration for NASLite+ and all the disk config is just groped from the disks themselves as the system boots. So in theory you could take one of your NASLite disks and put it in a totally different NASLite server and it would just boot up and start serving the disk with all the data intact. No config necessary.

For this reason you should also be able to change the NIC in your NASLite box without affecting your data.

I'm sorry I can't answer about the 4G thing.

John

John,

Thanks for your reply. This sounds good.

-- Alex

Alex,

You can just add a new hard drive into your NAS and configure it using option 4 of your menu, make sure your aware of which disk is which number because you could reformat the original disk - not good

NASlite isn't like windows, you can set up and configure all your software on a different machine and then just run the cd and floppy on your NAS box without any problems, I usually boot my windows pc to the NASlite cd to configure the floppy or usb flash drive before running it on the NAS. I have changed the whole system in a number of upgrades over the last 3 months including switching to the USB version and the NASlite configurations just run from the boot up. If you change any ip adresses etc you just resave the configuration to the floppy or usb device in the USB vers. So shutdown your NAS open the case swap out the NIC and reboot, a good card recognised by NASlite is the Netgear gigabit card the GA311, NASlite will boot and show the network device as gigabit, and away you go

There was 4GB limit but that was changed in vers 1.3, if you check the revision history http://www.serverelements.com/history.p ... SLite-PLUS
here you'll see what changes have been made

Good luck

Wilbur