NASLite Network Attached Storage

Does NASLite+ support multiple NICs? I saw just one post inferring that you could "bind" multiple NICs so that to NASLite+ they appeared to be one. The post wasn't so clear on how to do this....

Regards.

dont quite understand....
I was wondering if i used 2 nics, that i cound stream movies to 2 tvs at the same time with less lag

bill

2 nics won't help.


What hardware are you running with naslite?

One 100Mb card in the server should be more than fast enough to feed a pair of TVs. The problem is with your hardware, likely the drive. You will need a fast drive to get the job done. Think Raptor or the like. you are going to be pulling data from 2 different parts of the drive platter at the same time and this will put a load on the drive that is hard for most standard 7200 RPM drives to meet. Look at the specs of the drives and find the drives that have the highest I/Os per second, this is where you will find the speed you need to get the job done. Raw bit rate won't be enough.

Mike

I regularly stream 2 or even 3 MPEG2 files (TV recordings) from NASLite+ with no lag using standard 7200 IDE drives.

It is all about buffers guys. If the player on the client side buffers the data (as it should) and the NASLite server has enough RAM to properly buffer the reads (as it should) and the board/disks support DMA in order to keep up with the network rate (as they should), then the results should be very positive.

A properly sized and configured NASLite+ server should have no problem in saturating the associated network regardless of how many streams are being drawn.

Some general things to consider, cheap hardware is chatty and often takes a lot of the CPU time with IRQ demands. Cheap NICs such as the low-end RTLs are notorious for that. There isn’t much one can expect from such configurations even if NASLite minds the resources. Point being, a single piece of hardware in the server can monopolize the CPU and bus enough as to cause all kinds of performance issues.

The above are general observations that may prove valuable in resolving some performance problems.