NASLite Network Attached Storage

Thanks for the half off sale, got the whole server set with all the options.

So far seems to work well, booted up clean to the USB on my KT3 Ultra2 test system. Found the four 320GB drives and formatted in just a few minutes. So far some interesting things have shown up.

1) If I let the mobo detect the drives, they come up as UDMA(100). However if I turn them off in BIOS and let nasLite detect them, then only are reported as UDMA(33).

2) The system only seems to recognize 1GB of memory. I tried with two at first and the second gig was not found. So far it reports 905212 total, 898460 used and 35384 buffers.

3) Throuput seems pretty good. With a gigabit card installed XP shows 30-35% network utilization to the server.

Not too bad so far, I do want to see what version 2.0 will include. Especially if it will allow internal SATA raid cards or connections to external SCSI Raid arrays.

Good job!

Hi Mike,

You are welcome and thanks for your support.


NASLite is not capable of configuring the board components without the aide of the BIOS, so what you are describing is absolutely normal. What NASLite can do is handle disk geometries that the BIOS is uncapable of addressing. The only reason one would want to set IDE disks to NONE is if the BIOS causing problems or hanging on boot due to drive type or size.


NASLite uses a Linux kernel capable of handling 1G max in RAM. It is very uncommon for one to use that ammount of RAM since the gains are minimal if any.


Speeds can be great, especially with a well tuned network. We've been running tests with x-over cable on Gbit with top-line results. That's how we tune our test boxes anyway

NASLite-2 is getting close...

Thanks for the info Tony ... I REALLY am looking forward to NasLite2.

Glad to hear the the kernal only sees 1GB memory, I was worried at first. I'm used to adding additional RAM to servers, so usually 2GB is the minimum. Interesting to see one that runs well only on a gig. The network performance is what I expected, being limited right now by HD throughput.

The only odd item so far has been an occarional error indicating a 8259a problem along with IRQ7 (if I remember correctly). However some research indicates that this is common with Linux and the AMD chip. It has not caused any problem I have seen (so far), so I'm just assuming that is a known bug.

I'm sure you have already heard this ... but getting support to controllers beyond the motherboard IDE is critical.

The ones right now on the shelf that I want to use with Naslite are:
1) Promise SX6000 6-channel RAID (using RAID 5)
2) Promise SX4060 4-channel RAID (using RAID 5)
3) Adaptec 2400a (using RAID 5)
4) VIA based SATA Raid cards (trying a 00 configuration)

Hopefully NasLite 2 will support harware raid, and hopfully some limited software version. For example, being able to span writes across to disks.

Since dual channel raid 1/0 cards are dirst cheap now, you could get some great inexpensive performance by hooking up two cards, each with two drives, then spanning the cards. Layered RAID can really start to move some data.

Good luck ... please keep the testing up .. I want to see version 2.0

Thanks!
... Mike ....