NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hiya guys,

although I hate to class myself as a n00b, this is a relatively new area for me to venture into and was looking for some advice. I currently have 3x PC's at home all networked via a Linksys WiFi Router (4x LAN 1xWLAN ports).

There is 1x tower PC (3.2ghz P4 HT, 2GB RAM, 2x250GB Maxtor SATA, 1x300GB Maxtor SATA both running off 3 of the 4 available SATA ports on the mobo, 1x Gigabyte LAN NIC on the mobo).

There is 1x Home Theater PC (2.4 ghz celeron, 512mb RAM, 1x20GB IDE HD, 100mb/s NIC on mobo).

There is 1x Laptop (can ignore this as it as is only sharing the printer).


I want to create the NAS box to use as network storage on the network as at the moment the main PC needs to be on constantly to serve media to the media centre. The main tower pc is a development PC and will also use the NAS for a lot of storage.

My main concerns are i) cost, ii) cost and iii) cost!!

I have a PC kindly donated to me which is a PIII 866mhz on board 100mb/s NIC and 4x IDE ports, and 3x PCI slots. I was thinking of using this to create my first NAS box. I was thinking of investing a bit of money in it over the next year or so, but was looking at upgrading this box over a gradual period.

I was looking at spending money on a SATA RAID card first, and need reccomendations for one. Also I am looking for speed and redundancy, and was looking at both RAID 5 and RAID 0+1 or 1+0.

My main questions are:-

i) Which RAID levels will allow me to add more disks to the array at a later date. E.g. If I start with a single 300gb disk, can I add another disk later and have this as a RAID 1 setup, so it mirrors the existing disk? Will I be able to add another 2 disks later in a similar setup to provide 600GB of mirrored disks? Or is it better to create a RAID 5 setup and increase the capactiy of the array by adding more disks on a gradual basis?

ii) Does Naslite / Naslite+ / Naslite 2 USB support the NEW Sil3114 SATA Serial ATA 5 Port Cards? (Uses the Silicon Image 3114 chipset which now supports software RAID 5 +10).

I know that software RAID 5 is fairly CPU intensive and may not be great with my PIII 866mhz so any suggestions on other cards would be great. PS. I'm not very rich and £265 for a SATA card is a little too pricey!

Cheers guys!!

Greetings. This is not an answer to your question but a by-stander's comment. I have an old Gateway 400mhz MoBo w/Gigabit NIC serving full DVD rips, ISOs, DivX/XviD, and MPG videos to both wired and wireless media centers. I am using 2 7200rpm hard drives split between the 2 IDE channels to ease the burden of copying large video files to the NASLite server while videos are being streamed (in case you chose to do that). All works extremely well with no drop outs. Backups are done from this server to another standby NASLite server. I simply avoided the RAID question.

The PIII computer is more than fast enough to serve as a NAS box so you're set there.

As to the RAID:

The card you ask of is software RAID and will not work in NL as a RAID card. It may work as just a set of SATA ports though, not sure. Any level of RAID be it 0,1,0+1,4,5,50 will have to be supported HARDWARE based cards. RAID 5 will give you the ability to expand the array in a per drive basis but the performance hit will be massive and may take days to complete. Also the performance will be a bit shy of the 0+1 configuration. 0+1 does get more expensive as you scale it up in size but for you and I it really is a moot point. The question as to adding more storage on the fly really depends on the RAID card and the BIOS utilitie built in. All I can Recomend is RTFM and see what they can and can't do.

The 3Ware cards are going on Ebay for reasonable prices and the exchange rate is in your favor if you're buying from an american seller so have a look at them. Just be sure that the card will work in a 5Volt/32bit PCI slot, some of the newer ones will not.

The reason to use the hardware RAID cards is that they do not use the onboard processor for the RAID function so there is no hit in performance. Also it allows better flexability and reliability.

Mike

Cheers for the info Mike. I thought the CPU would be good enough for the NAS box, and it was the RAID I was concerned about more than anything. You suggest RAID 0+1 is better for you and I over RAID 5. Is that due to the cost implications?

Do you think it would be better to setup a RAID 0 array first then mirror it with a second RAID 0 array?

Also what HD's do people reccomend for NAS's? Some one told me to stay away from Maxtors, but didnt give any reason as to why??

The RAID5 array will be easier to expand and cheaper per megabyte than the RAID0+1 The down side is that the performance will not be as good in the area of writes to the array.

As far as disks go I like Seagates. I have Maxtors as well but they do fail now and then. At least the older ones. Just FYI, Maxtor is now owned by Seagate. Stay away from the Hitachi and fujitsu drives unless they are the enterprise class drives with the 5 year waranty. You'll need it.

Mike

Cheers again for the info mike. Looking into it a bit more i can easily add 4x 250gb SATA HD's to my NAS for £200, which will give me the terabyte storage im looking for (minus the redundancy). I was looking at this option first, and then adding the redundancy at a later date in the form of another 4x SATA drives. I can see an issue though, and that is getting an 8 port SATA RAID controller. Is it possible to get 2x RAID controllers to pool resources so i can have 2x RAID 0 arrays that are mirrored? As this would mean I can get 2x RAID cards for about £80 which would suit me perfectly!!

Maybe I dont want the RAID solution at all. I might eventually setup an identical NAS and use it to backup the other every week or so. Do you know how easy it is to backup NAS boxes to each other? Being a Linux virgin I have no experience at all!!

PS do you happen to know which Maxtor drives are produced by Seagate? i.e. diamond max 10 etc?

Cheers for the info so far!