NASLite Network Attached Storage

[HH] Butter

I have a gigabit network card in my NAS, I used the Netgear GA311.

For general transfers it's been fine the only problem I've had is trying to stream High Def movies and we (that's the royal "we" on the forum here) have come to the conclusion that the IDE controller on my motherboard can't cope with the speed of the network so I get a buffer underrun kind of effect and slower transfer rates compared to the rest of the network.

In the next week or so I should be upgrading the m/board to one that is ATA 100 so hopefully that will ease the situation

So my advice for what it's worth is go ahead and put in the gigabit card, but beware that your m/board's IDE controller may struggle to keep up with the transfer rates. Considering the cost of a card about £15 in the UK putting in a gigabit card gives you bigger pipelines and can only benefit the whole network and help remove any bottlenecks transferring in and out of your NASbox.
Good luck

Epia M10000
Netgear GA311
512mb DDR
2x120gb HD
2x160gb HD
16mb ancient USB-stick
200w Achme PSU (a.k.a. Shuttle PSU)

Everything is built into an old external scsi box (18mmx18mmx30mm).
Had some trouble with a "out of memory" issue. But i somehow disappeared by itself.
Now it runs fine, only booting is a bit sluggish. I blame my ancient 16 usb-stick for that.

SMB write speed is about 15mb/s
FTP write speed is about 23mb/s

I dont know why SMB is so sluggish. But its enough to stream my movies.

SMB is generally chattier than FTP, but it shouldn't make that much difference. I seem to remember figures of 95% of FTP speeds being quoted around here somewhere.

Hi Wilbur,

Thank you for your suggestion. I did install a D-Link DGE-530T adapter and here are the results of my performance test using DiskWriggler:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\Carlos>diskwriggler -NTSC -C -t -n 2000 -o S:\tmp
Frame Resolution : 720 x 486
Bytes / Pixel : 2.00 (packed) (8 bit, 4:2:2 sampling)
Frame Size : 699,840 bytes
File Type : All frames in one container file (1,399,680,000 bytes).
*
*
*
Write Summary : 2000.00 frames in 126.44 secs
: 14.36(min) 15.82(avg) 16.15(max) FPS
: 9.58(min) 10.56(avg) 10.78(max) MB/s
*
*
*
Read Summary : 2000.00 frames in 174.77 secs
: 6.01(min) 11.44(avg) 12.41(max) FPS
: 4.01(min) 7.64(avg) 8.28(max) MB/s

BTW My hub is a LINKSYS 8-Port 10/100/1000 Gigabit Switch Model SD2008

Should I have expected better performance!?

Motherboard now an MSI K4 Socket A board with an AMD XP2400+ processor and 256mb of Samsung PC2100 DDR RAM, also added another 300GB Seagate 7200.7 drive. I am now getting UDMA 100 transfer from the disks and new m/board is all ready for SATA drives awaiting Vers 2.0

So Tony when do you see that happening