NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hiya,

quick question before I purchase this superb piece of software. I have 3x HD's and I want to create my first NAS box. Looking in the documentation and forums, I seem to get the impression that the NAS will serve these drives as 3 individual drives. IS there anyway to get it to use all 3x drives as one large drive?

Cheers

With NASLite 1.x the answer is no.

With NASLite 2.x if you use a hardware raid card you can get them to appear as one disk. Look for a card that supports JBOD such as the 3Ware 7xxx and 8xxx series.

Hiya,

thanks for the reply. Is it only JBOD that it supports and not RAID 0?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong , but JBOD is the only RAID option that allows for all drives to be seen as one drive.

Hiya,

you are close mate. RAID 0 does the same function, but whereas using a 100gb and a 300gb disk in JBOD will give you "one" useable disk with 400gb capacity, RAID 0 will only give you 200gb capacity (combines 100gb from each drive and discards the other 200gb on the 2nd disk).

Both perform the same function i.e. spanning across multiple disks, but JBOD doesn't tend to waste any space. Both don't have any redundancy, so you have to back them up another way.

Phil

So, the choice between JBOD and Raid 0 boils down to, do you want more performance at the cost of wasted disk space, or do you simply want more disk space?

well to be honest that isnt the question. There is little performance difference, if any between JBOD and RAID0. The question i asked was did the cards that were described above support ONLY JBOD? I would ideally like to get a cheap RAID controller to setup a 1tb file server either raid0 or jbod, and upgrade it later to a 1tb RAID 0+1 server later.
i just wanted to know if nas would serve all the disks as one instead of 4. As stated above nas2 will but only with hardware raid. Any suggestions on a cheap 4 port raid card?

The answer is no, you have to use a TRUE RAID card to get that. NL1.x and NL2.x will simply export each drive as a disk to be used and not combine them.

As to performance the JBOD is basicaly set up like this. The first drive is hit with writes until it gets full and then the second disk in line is hit. this continuse until that ones full and so on. The performance on the reads and writes is only as good as the drive its self.

On RAID0 the data is written or read in stripes on each drive in a round robin approch. This allows the drives to service each request in turn and complet it before it's turn comes around again. This makes for som very fast reads and writes. WAY FASTER than JBOD. With the interface of most of the NAS boxes being 100Mb it is moot but if your pushing 1Gb then it will start to matter.

Mike