NASLite Network Attached Storage

My MoBos internal NIC is not detected by NL so I bought a NetGear GA311. Had some difficulties with the IRQs but got the GA311 on a "not shared" IRQ. The problem was that with SMB (Win XP Pro SP2 machines), I get very low "write to NAS" speeds which made the NAS unusuable (too slow for the office). The reads were always fast but not as fast as I hoped (the computer is real fast). The FTP was always fast for read and write.

So I installed Ubuntu server 7.04 for AMD64. Ubuntu sees the onboard NIC and the NetGear GA311. When I plug the gigabit lan cable to the onboard lan, read and writes (via SMB) are very very fast. If I plug it in the NetGear, the speeds go down (but haven't tested intensly).

1/ Do you think that if I buy an Intel PRO 1000 NIC, NasLite will work fast as it should or will I be wasting money for nothing?

2/ The Intel Pro 1000 exists on PCI or PCI express, did anybody try the PCI express version ?

TIA and best regards.

Thanks a lot for all the helpful answers....

No answer probably only means that no-one is able to give you an answer rather than that no-one is willing to give you the answer.

Both cards are obviously supported. Some people prefer the GA311 and others prefer an Intel. Each one performs better than the other under certain conditions so your questions are very subjective and really have no one valid answer.

seems people using the realtek chip suffer network throughpt, so i'm switching to intel, what card do we need? the GT (desktop) or MT (server) I'm guessing the latter but just want to check as its 4x the price!

OK, follow-up on my initial post.

I have dumped the NetGear 311 card and bought an Intel PRO 1000 MT Desktop.

The read / write speeds were much better and very stable. Ubuntu server 64 is still faster (using the onboard lan chip) than NASLite but now NL is stable and usable with correct transfer speeds.

In short, the intel chip (82540 EM) works better than the Realtek one.

Regards

Did the Intel card have the same probem with sharing IRQ's as the GA311?

It took me hours of trying different bios options to get my GA311 NIC and the RAID card to stop sharing an IRQ.

Hi,

Well, I didn't do the same thing with both cards so I cannot answer precisely. I had read on the forum that setting the BIOS to "NON PNP OS" cleared up things and that is what I did. I don't think that IRQs are shared (I can't see who has which IRQ on the SysLog (it says "PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing")

I hope this helps.

Robby

i too made the switch but bought the server version, throughput is now higher and more stable. anyone know if i can use both gigbit ports for more throughput on the intel MT server card?

I replaced the GA311 with an Intel Pro and i seem to have a stable machine now. I don't know whether it's sharing an IRQ as it doesn't report it in the syslog or network adaptor details in the admin section.

The reply is a bit late but no you cannot use both cards with NL.

Regards.

Might be a bit late now as this is an old post but i am using a netgear GA311 on my naslite system and getting great results and not had any noted problems with it , currantly getting between 65-70 mb on the sample of network traffic part on server screen

Steve

A bit late I know but I can tell you that the Intel and 3com gigabit cards perform. My machine is a Dual Opteron 285 based machine on a Tyan K8WE S2895 motherboard with the nVidia Nforce gigabit NICs on board and 8GB of RAM (only 2.8GB of the RAM is seen by the OS), The OS is 32bit Vista Ultimate. I have a 10K seagate Cheetaha Ultra320 SCSI drive in it. The NAS box is based on an old Intel D845 motherboard, P4 2GHz/400MHz FSB with 512MB of RAM, the NIC is a 3com 3c985SX with a fiber interface to an Allied Telesyn 12 port Gigabit switch.

The machine on a large file, 5GB, sustained a transfer rate to the NAS box of 58MB/sec or a sustained a real through put of 464Mbps. This limit was likely due to the ATA drive in the NAS box which is a Seagate 500GB 7.2k drive on a PATA 100 interface. The machine with a ga311 card based on the Realtek chip was not very stable and the throughput sucked compared.

Advice, Pop for the Intel or 3Com gigabit NICs, You will not be sorry!

Mike