NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hiya,

PC beginner here, hoping I'll be able to cope with NASLite HDD. I've had a quick read of the hardware configurations that members have working at the moment, but have not noticed anything the same as I'm hoping to set up.

Do you think I'd be okay using an AMD300 with 300ish MB of ram, starting with 2x500gb ide hdd's, and expanding from there with more 500gb discs is that workable?

Look forward to hearing any coments,

Cheers

This first machine I had it running on was an old Pentium 200MMX with 96MB of RAM and a gigabit NIC, it ran like a top for almost 2 years before I upgraded it to a celeron 400 and 256MB of RAM. Even at that there was not a whole lot of difference in performance. Almost any processor will provide great performance with NL.

I did have a problem with an older Duron 800 and a cheep motherboard just not being stable and hanging. It does happen from time to time that certain hardware just don't want to work. My personal preference is for an Intel motherboard and processor, they have just worked flawlessly for me in the past.

Good luck and welcome to the fold,

Mike

Thank you for your reply, nice to hear that the older chips can still perform well at something.

In theory it should be all okay then, just be unlucky if the board plays up.

Fingers Crossed,

I'll dig the old thing out tommorow,



Cheers

"300ish MB of ram" ... sounds ok, but if ever a filesystem check gets done with those large disks there is some possibility of the system hanging. There have been isolated reports in that regard, and it may depend heavily on the number/size of files on the disk being checked. Most of the time you will be ok. Also, if you in the future use the MIRROR feature, RAM could again become a little limiting. 512MB should do better ( ... I know ... extra old RAM might be expensive and hard to find ... just thought I would point this out ...).
Georg

Thank you Georg for the warning, I can only ever think of running a checkdisc program once or twice, ever.
To be honest I'm not sure what it does, probably why I've not really used such a program.......hmmmm
Please could you explain simply what such a program may do, apart from possibly causing a hang much appreciated

Another question, hope you don't mind, while were talking about the mirror function, I use Robocopy at the moment to back up to the external drive on the everyday pc, is this going to be able to copy/mirror to the NASLite box ?

Not knowig much about the Linux system, would these hdd's need defraging, I guess this could possibly hang also, due to the 500gb size ?

Many thanks for your thoughts

NASLite performs disk ckecks and it has been reported that too little memory may cause problems. I have 512MB (thanks Georg!)and have never had a problem.
As far as mirror, use NASlite if you plan on mirroring the drives inside your NAS (for example the 2 500GB drives you mention). As far as backing up you PC any software should work. I use true image to backup my PC to the NAS. Windows sync toy is also good and I use it to keep my photos and music in line between the NAS and PC.

Hello DeafCat:

Like jmiliz said ... 512 should be ok (but he/she meant to say 512MB, not KB).

The "checkdisc" is really an automatic function done by NASLite, based on how Linux does it, and you don't need to do anything to initiate it, it happens by itself. On extremely rare occasions (major data corruption) a manual intervention may be required, and that's when 512MB+ would be good to have (again -- depending on your file systems etc).

Defrag: rarely needed in Linux/NASLite due to a different philosophy of allocating disk clusters (compared to Windows). This is the simple answer, if you're interested in technical details search the net for "Linux defrag".

Mirror: Norton Ghost 9 is scheduled to run a backup of my primary HDD in the morning to a second local HDD, then a script automatically copies the backup image to NASLite shortly thereafter. NASLite runs a mirror between two of its local disks later in the day. So, in essence, counting the live primary data, it is in 4 places (separate HDDs) after the NASLite mirror finishes. Overkill, but the mirror also makes a copy of other unique data on the NASLite source disk.

Hope this helps.
Georg