NASLite Network Attached Storage

I am looking to build a NASLite-2 system off of and older Workstation I have and could use a little advice. I am essentially looking for a machine that can do sequential Read/Writes in the 60MB/sec+ range which is what I get now across my Gigabit Lan when transferrring data between 2 workstations. The bottleneck appears to be the Lan as Local transfers are in the 100MB/s range. As a side note, I tried the Intel Entry Storage System NAS and sequential reads were dismal at 15MB/s.

My Existing Hardware for this build:
Dual AMD Athlon MP 1800s
1 Gig Ram
4x 7200rpm 400GB WD RE2 enterprise drives

EDIT: Forgot to mention I will probably go with RAID10 as I need to sqeeze as much performance as possible out of a redundant (non-Raid0) system.

Will add:
LSI LOGIC MEGARAID SATA 150-6 PCI SATA Controller Card - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816118011
and a compatable Gigabit Lan card.

I'm looking for some performance estimates based on people's experiences with similar hardware and any red flags anyone sees with anything listed. The reason I am going this route is I need a system that can serve files to more than 10 simultaneous users and don;t want to deal with Windows Server licenses just to distribute data to 15+ stand-alone workstations. Is the NAS the right option? Thanks for any help!

The hardware should perform well but the second processor will do you no good, NL doesn't support multi-processor setups.

As far as speed of the transfers you might want to stick with the 3Com, Intel, or Dlink gigabit cards and make sure that the switch is not just one of the cheap boxes off of Ebay. I theroy you should have no problem getting into the high 60s or low 70s with that kind of a setup as long as the reads are sequential. Ralph is the one to really comment as he has doen extensive testing of the software. I think he posted some test results in another thread, if I can find it I will link to it for you.

Mike

Thanks for your reply. If you can find the link, that would be great, I'm looking for it also.

I have never used Linux but does anyone think I would get better performance out of a regular Linux file server so I could use the second CPU? It will be a multi-user environment. I'll need to research the licensing schemes as I dont want to spend the Microsoft equivalent of $2000 on Windows Server + 20 CALs

I doubt that the second CPU would get you anything as far as performance. If you were to use a full distro of linux there will be a fair bit of tunning to get the performance out of it that you will with NL. There are no licensing limits imposed by NL as far as clients.

You do know that there is no security at all, no logon, no file locking, no user control? If these are not problems then I would highly recomned NL2.x, for $29.00 it is a total steal.

http://www.serverelements.com/phpBB2/vi ... 1a1d0274ad

http://www.serverelements.com/phpBB2/vi ... 1a1d0274ad

Hope these help,

Mike

Thank you mikeiver1 for your help. You are correct, at $30 it is worth it to just "try it out" but the lack of access control does present some obstacles as I need to be able to prevent general level access to admin information, proposals, invoices, etc. Someone else mentioned interest in a "pro" version and I have to second this. Personally I would be willing to pay 3x the amount of the current software to have the same access control and backup features of the consumer level products coupled with the custimizable hardware options and performance offered by naslite2.