NASLite Network Attached Storage

Thanks for the info. I just got the card yesterday and have been trying to get it all going. I have 5 drives connected to it but can't get but four of them to show up. I'll keep fooling with it, as I'm sure its probably a cable, jumper, or something. I've got a bunch of "no longer used" 160GB USB drives that I'm cracking open and using to build this box.

With a good set of RAID management tools, you'll be able to tell which drive has failed without taking the server off-line, and if your hardware supports hot swap, replace the drive, again without taking the server off-line, and the lack of an audible alarm on the RAID card would not be a problem - the RAID tools could create an audio alert or even send you an email.

These features are available in IBM's ServeRAID Manager & Dell's RAID Storage Manager (both based on the same Adaptec utility) and even your SiliconImage SATA stuff

Well the 3ware card also has a great set of tools to use in Linux, but that isn't what we are talking about here since NASLite doesn't allow you to use any of those tools. So its irrelevant for this discussion. You will get no indication that a drive has failed unless you look in the logs, and then you have to use the firmware utility to figure out what drive failed. Honestly, this makes NASLite not a very good RAID solution since you could never rely on this type of a setup for something in production. My intended use of it I think will be fine.

I'm glad you pointed that out - the tools are avaible, the need is there, the solution is obvious - ServerElements needs to find a way to include them.

I think that given their model, it would be impossible for them to include the tools since they have to boot from a very small footprint and support a wide array of solutions. The thing I think they will want to do is figure out how to allow the user to configure an action to occur from an event in the log.... such as an alarm or email. That would solve the problem almost entirely.

When we added support for hardware raid, we took into account that the raid cards onboard audible alarm would be the alert of a degraded array, thats what it's for right? In the current model it would not be applicable to install vendor specific tools for every card supported.

Personally I have never seen a true hardware raid card that didn't have an onboard alarm, could the people who have cards that have no alarms post the vendor/model numbers? If there's a sizeable amount of cards without we could probably come up with a solution.

I don't believe the 3Ware cards have alarms, at least the 8 port IDE cards don't. I think this is a pretty popular card for NASLite users from what I've seen, since it lets you use up to 8 older IDE drives to build a system. These cards are high end cards, so its not a function of card price.

Going purely from memory - the Adaptec based ROMB (RAID on Mother Board) option on the Dell PowerEdge servers don't have audible alarms and I don't recall ever hearing an IBM ServeRAID card beep on a disk failure.