NASLite Network Attached Storage

Okay... I'm a student... a PC (Win/Lin) guy about to go down the Apple Bootcamp path, and my thoughts on storage for this solution is to setup an independant GbNAS system that can connect all of my systems. NASlite+ looks like a solution that could suit me, but I have a few questions on hardware and how NASlite+ integrates.

I intend to build a modern, budget system for the NAS server. I'm currently spec'ing:

Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M
AMD Sempron 3100+ 64-Bit 256K 90nm
1 GB (2 pcs 512) DDR 400
(2) Hitachi (HDD0A300229) Deskstar 7400K 400GB 7200RPM SATA 8MBC
(2) "Laying Around" WD 80GB ATA133
(2) D-Link DGE-530T 32-Bit 1000 Base-T

Using a D-Link DGS-1008TL GigaExpress 8-Port Layer2 Gb Switch to connect my:

"Future" Dual Woodcrest (hopefully) Mac Tower
PPC Mac mini
P4 Portable (over Wifi, when roaming around the house)

The plan is to have my existing D-Link WiFi Router pipe broadband from the router to the switch and feed the systems at my work area.

I need a super fast connection between the Bootcamp Mac and the NAS, so I was wondering if I could "bridge" 2 Gb connections at using the NASlite+ system. I deal with large quantities of "LARGE" image files and while I don't need instantaneous transfer, I need it to be pretty snappy.

I'd also like to know if NASlite+ can work with USB2.0 External Drives in anyway. I'd like to be able to dump working files off the NAS when projects have ended.

Finally, I'd like to know if NASlite+ can work with any boot managers, I'd love the ability to be able to boot the NAS server with 64bit Linux in a pinch for extra rendering power.

Any input, comments or insight you can share would be great.

Thanks

JDex

I'll answer your questions as they apply to NASLite+ version 1. Version 2 is coming "soon" and will have many new features. You can do a search on the forum to find out what Tony and Ralph have said about version 2 so far.

Your budget NAS Server:
NASLite+ doesn't support SATA drives in version 1, so you'll have to wait for version 2 if you want SATA.
1GB of memory is probably overkill. 512Meg would be plenty in my opinion. NASLite+ only uses 8MB for the kernel and the rest of memory is buffers.
NASLite+ doesn't support bridging or joining ethernet ports. It uses one ethernet port and that's it. Your main limitation to transfer speed is going to be how fast you can read/write to the disks.
NASLite version 1 doesn't support USB drives. Version 2 is rumored to have this support.


Most users report 7-11MB/sec transfer rates. Some people using all GB connections and fast hardware/disk drives report 20-30MB/sec transfer rates. Do a forum search on "diskwriggler" to see what various people are reporting. On my old slow (200MHZ processor and UDMA33 IDE bus) I get 7-9MB/sec. I use Photoshop CS2 and store 3-4MB jpegs on the NAS box. It takes about 1 sec/picture to load. If you're dealing with 40MB tiff files expect 4-5 seconds to load. Some of the transfer time is operating system (Windows or Mac) overhead.

Booting:
NASLite+ includes a kernel and everything it needs to run on a bootable CD or USB key. It is not something that runs on top of Linux, nor can you run the NAS code with other applications on the same server. The server will be a dedicated NAS system and that's it. There isn't a 64bit version at this time as far as I know.

Thank you very much for the response.

I'm afraid that NASLite won't work for me then. It's very important to me that I can get at least 100Mbps, and that is possible with a Linux Fileserver... so I guess that will be the way to go in this solution. Guess I'll need to dig in deep with Linux configuration (which I guess won't be a wholly bad thing).

Thank You again.

Between bottlenecks (Hard drives, ethernet cards) and network latency, you will never, ever get 100 mbps speed on a 10/100 card, or 1000mbps with a GigE card on any platform or OS.


During my benchmarking for v2 of naslite, using 2 identical Dell 1730 Servers (client and server), Dual 2.8ghz Zeon's,dual gigE, 2 gigs of ram, 2x40 scsi drives in a hardware raid 1, speeds averaged around 20-30mbps second over the network. Crossover cabled direct, it was apparent network latency is responsible for a tremendous slowdown in speed. NASLite v2 exceeded in speed of all the other solutions I benchmarked, including standard linux distro's. Keep in mind, this was done without using jumbo frames.

100Mbits/sec minimum, that's not very fast at all. I will assume you made a typo and ment 100MB/sec. You could get this but get out your wallet. Ralph makes some very good points.

Let me just say that if you ar looking for 100MB/sec you will not get that with Gigabit Ethernet. You will have to be looking at 2Gigabit FCAL or some incarnation of Infiniband (2.5Gb/sec/channel) I have not found anything out there allowing you to bond a pair of ethernet connections to get the agrigate bandwidth of the two, I looked a short while ago.

Also keep in mind that unless you are a guru at kernel and driver tunning you will not get top performance out of most hardware you apply to this problem.

I presently have an FCAL drive array and with the 14 Seagate 10K drives stripped software RAID0 in windows XP Pro it will just about get 95MB/sec sustained sequential transfer rate. Mind you that the PCI bus is almost saturated by this. Also note that the FCAL bus on the array is 1.062Gb so the 95MB/sec is about all the pipe will push. My setup uses a pair of the 5100 arrays which are 1.062Gb, I will be pushing them through a FCAL switch (Qlogic Sanbox 2-64 in my case) which has ports that work at both 1Gb and 2Gb.

What does all this mean? You can do it but the cost of hardware is high and you really have to work at it.

The best option for you is to get an 8 or 12 port 3Ware card off of Ebay and put a bunch of SATA ot PATA drives on it in a RAID5. These cards will kill the Gigabit ethernet pipe. Sustained transfers of close to 800MB/sec properly configured according to 3Ware for the newer SATA cards. Again grab your ankles, not cheap.

If you have very rich parents then just go multichannel FCAL RAID using one of the FFX2 cards by Mylex and a pair of Sun StorEdge 5200 enclosures or the like. Another option would be SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and a hardware RAID card from say LSI or Qlogic or Adaptec. Advantage to the SAS RAID controler over SATA is that you can use SATA drives with the SAS RAID cards and add SAS drives when the price is right or you need beter performance. You can even mix them and have both SAS and SATA drives on the controler at the same time.

Also the hardware for the NAS box is way overkill, you will need a 66MHz/64Bit PCI bus or better to get the data moved.

I can make other segestions if your interested.

Mike