NASLite Network Attached Storage

I received an i4 today, plugged it in, configured 2 x 200GB as R1 - but it only seems to see each drive as 128GB, but I can't seem to find a stated upper drive size limit for this card.

Does anyone know if this card is capable of "seeing" drives as bigger than 128GB or am I limited to that size?

Thanks,

Nick.

I just started playing with my LSI Megaraid i4 card today
So I'm no guru
I hooked 3 drives on it (Samsung 400GB) in raid 5
got a logical volume of about 799 GB, spot on for raid 5

don't have naslite2 yet
got my CF card, 4x400 Gb drives, just waiting on my CF to IDE adapter

Thanks for the reply - what firmware revision are you using? I think mine's v1.01. Nice card - seen under NASLite-2 no problem at all! There may be a "muppet factor" involved - I'll check the settings on the drives themselves to see that I haven't inadvertently set the jumper wrongly.

bios version 1.03, june 2002

You happen to got 2 jumpers on your harddrive?
1 is for master/slave config and the other limits the capacity

prolly something simple

I'll go looking for the updated BIOS and also rip the NAS box apart to check the jumpers. Hi ho, Hi ho, it's off to dell (.com, or maybe LSILogic.com obsolete equipment archive) we go!

edit......

Holy "see the whole drive" Batman! Flashed the card with new firmware and I can now see all 200GB of each drive - now to re RAID1 that pair and move the 250GB drive onto the card....... I was *fairly* sure that I had the drive jumpers in the right place

Thanks for your confirmation that the card can indeed see large disks.

Nick.

Do you know if you can add another drive to the raid array without redoing everything? For example if I am using raid 5 with three drives, start to run low on space can I add a fourth drive?

The nature if RAID5, ie. Data1, Data2, ....., DataN, Parity would suggest that it would be difficult if not impossible to add a drive into, what would be, the middle of the RAID.

Online capacity expansion has been available for many years - whether or not your particular RAID controller supports it is a different question, and whether or not your OS allows it is yet another.

As far as I know, NASLite does not allow it.

The megaraid card supports both online drive expansion and online raid changes so the question now is will naslite support it. If not I may have to install ubuntu server or put windows xp on the server.

After adding the new drive and rebuilding the array using the BIOS utility you will have to use a linux distro and the instructions that Ralph posted a while back inorder to expand the drive to take all available space. After that NASlite will see the additional space.

Apologies for limited thinking with respect to RAID resizing from drive addition - I didn't see any way of performing the migration without the intervention of an operating system and device specific software.

I got this card the other day and set it up with four 200gb drives in raid5. I did have to flash the card for naslite to recognize the logical drive, but it was pretty easy. I only have one question.

The card supports SMART, but is there a way for naslite to display the SMART information from the drives?

I see a few people have this card. I just got one too (the DELL OEM version), so I have a few questions to compare notes with you.

1. I can't flash my card. I see people posting that have the Dell saying they could flash it with the LSI update. When I try to flash mine, it tells me that there is no update for my adapter (20 times in a row).

2. I'm testing recovery, because the last thing I want is to find out it doesn't work after all my data is sitting on it. Rebuilding is pathetically slow. (4x 300 GB drives - RAID5). Half a day and it sits at 50% and stops. NOT GOOD!! I'm currently testing a second time and it's in progress at 20%.

3. LSI datasheets say "Auto resume during array rebuild or reconstruction if the system shuts down". That doesn't seem to work on my system. Reboot and it starts all over at 0%.

I'm thinking maybe I should go with software RAID. But just seeing if my experience is something others are having too.

The mflash utility doesn't work from within Windows XP - you need to boot into DOS and then run the utility. I've just done this for my LSI i4 (series 511) - created a boot disk using the XP 'format' command and adding the files from http://www.lsi.com/files/support/rsa/N661.zip.

Before the flash, Naslite would report the card in the syslog but not see it as an available device for storage.