NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hi,

Have a NASLite box running the older version of Naslite+. I purchased a new tower, and power supply, and currently have three 500 GB IDE hard drives in it.

Since EIDE drives are no longer manufactured I wanted to add some more drives, and decided to maintain my current system which is a PIII 700MHz with 256MB Ram.

I decided to search for a PCI Sata card, and lucked out with this 6 port Sata card from LSI Logic. It has the following specs:

LSI Logic Ser523 Rev B2 6-Port PCI-X SATA Raid Controller,
64-bit/66MHz PCI bus,
Integrated Intel GC80302 I/O processor
Serial ATA 150 drive mode support
RAID Levels 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50 supported

Does anyone have any experience with this card? I am just looking to add more hard drives to my NAS tower, no need for RAID.

Thank you.

It's not entirely clear from the wording of your original post whether or not you have actually purchased the LSI RAID card yet. This card has a PCI-X connector. Does your motherboard have a PCI-X slot? If not, you'll need to check that the card will work in a standard 32-bit PCI slot. Even if it does, there will be part of the card connector which will extend beyond the PCI slot and you will need to ensure that it will not touch any motherboard components, such as capacitors, that might be sticking up just beyond the slot.

The more important issue is that that I cannot see any mention of the LSI Logic Ser523 RAID card on the supported list of storage devices. Perhaps others might be be better informed than me and able to comment more fully.

Good luck.

Hi leicray,

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I apologize for the confusion. I already purchased the card, and it is indeed compatible with a standard 32-bit PCI slot. I also made sure that it had the necessary clearance with the little bit that is exposed, and that it did not come in contact with any other components.

The person that I purchased it from said that this card exists mostly for servers and was not made available for the mainstream market. I thought I would ask just in case (I already did a search in the forum) to be sure.

I will go ahead and install it and upgrade from NASLite+ to NASLite M-2 and report back just in case someone in the future finds this card.

Thank you

*** UPDATE ***

I have some great news! The LSI Ser523 Rev B2 card is formally known as the LSI Logic MegaRAID SATA 150-6 Raid Controller, and is one of the Storage Controller chipsets supported by the various CORE3 Server Elements Operating Systems.

It apparently uses the "megaraid_mbox" driver!

This is one kickass PCI-to-SATA card!

That's excellent news. I must keep this card in mind if I ever have the need for a second RAID card.

BTW, are there both 4-port and 6-port versions of this card?

Yes, there are both versions, and you can find the 6-port version on eBay for $30! The built in hardware RAID might be of interest to you or others

Since I am new to RAID perhaps I can ask one more thing that pertains to this card and RAID.

I mainly bought this card to add newer SATA Hard Drives to my ancient system, and IDE/ATA Hard Drives are impossible to find so this was a great find at the time.

Now, I only have one 2TB SATA drive connected, and went through the user manual for the RAID setup. I currently have it set to RAID 0 (Data Striping). Since I do not have another SATA Hard Drive connected to this PCI-SATA-RAID card, will that cause an issue?

Do I need another Hard Drive, or will the current 2TB Hard Drive act as a fourth drive in the system?

Thank you

A little more info on what the config of the drives is would be of help.

Is the 2TB drive the only one or do you have more than one on the RAID card.

Mike

Hi mikeiver1,

I have 3 IDE drives and the CD-ROM in the system, and with the Sata to PCI-X I only have one SATA drive in it (2TB).

I also have one more weird question.

I am looking at upgrading the motherboard to a dual AMD Opteron CPU motherboard with 4GB of memory. The board will have 2 IDE ports and 2 SATA ports built into the motherboard.

If I swapped motherboards and disconnected the SATA drive from the RAID card to plug the SATA hard drive into the new motherboard directly, will I need to reformat the drive, or will it be an easy swap as simple moving the cable from one connector to the other?

As always, thank you everyone for your time and help and have a great weekend!

First of all the dual Opteron will be totally wasted on this kind of service. The kernel is not SMP so the second core will only produce waste heat. Also if the Opteron board is two separate processors rather than a single dual core then you may end up having to move it in order to get the use of half of the RAM to the processor that the kernel runs on. For reference my old P90 would easily saturate a 100Mb connection. The old network appliance boxes ran a P200 processor and could saturate almost 3 FDDI loops. Each loop was 155Mb/sec. NAS takes little horse power in regards to processing, memory and a fast controller and drive/s is where its at.

A couple of GB of RAM is more than enough, 4GB won't hurt though.

Should you migrate to another board and your drive is not part of an array other than RAID1 or maybe a single drive in a RAID0 array then it should be seen by the OS when it's hanging off of an on board controller. In the case of the RAID0 array there is more of a question as to whether it will be readable.

Mike

The x64 versions of NASLite do support SMP with 64bit cpu's, performance may or may not increase with SMP depending on what your doing.

Below is a screenshot of my M2 x64 box with a quad core Xeon.

News to me, thanks Ralph.

Looks like one hell of a heater you got there.

Mike

Mikeiver1,

Thank you for your help.

The motherboard I was looking at does indeed have two separate processors.

The disk on the PCI-x to SATA card is in RAID 0 at the moment.

The reason for asking is that the current system only has 288 MB of PC-133 SDRAM, and I can maximize it to 1.5 GB, but the cost of a 512 MB PC-133 SDRAM module is ridiculously overpriced on CL and eBay! $20-40 per stick!

The Dual Opteron system with two CPU's, heatsinks, and 4GB of memory included will only cost $40... and it has built in Gigabit.

I have the current NASLite box using a Gigabit NIC PCI card, and a Gigabit 5 port router connected.

For that price, I was thinking I couldn't go wrong for a cheap upgrade. The real limit was the ram pricing on PC-133 SDRAM.

Ralph,

Thank you for sharing Much appreciated

I would go for it then. The only thing I would do is remove the second processor and install all the RAM on the one processors memory bus. It will indeed be an upgrade for sure. If I were you I would look at getting a couple more 2TB drives and setup a RAID5 array off of the card. You will be surprised at the speed of the NAS after that.

Mike

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your help and time I will go ahead and do that then

Cheers,

Shane