NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello all,

First post - please be gentle.

I have a AMD Athlon 800MHz sitting on a GBit LAN with 2x 500GB SATA Disks using a PCI Controller, 768MB of Ram (the Motherboard maximum)

I use Naslite2 as a file Backup server, and Video Server of ripped DVD's.

Read/Write performance is great for files that are contigious. Can easily get 15MB/Sec on Samba and 25MB/Sec on FTP.

I found that files that are badly fragmented are choppy when being played back by my Media PC. Contiguous files work perfectly. This is true whether playing back the file locally or remotely. The media codecs and media player is best of breed - so nothing to change there.

What can I use to defrag the filesystem?

Dragging all the files to another HDD is no longer an option as I don't have 500GB spare - or cash to buy another drive.

Can I install Linux of some description somewhere and use that to defrag? Any particular flavour recommended? My NAS server is in the garage and is headless ...

The perfect solution would be if NASLite2 could have a feature to somehow defrag the file system - I know I'm not the first person to want to do this as searching the forum indicates. All I need is for each file to be contiguous - it doesn't matter whether they are stored together on the disk.

The alternative is to drop Naslite2 and install Windows .... which totally kills the option to have a low hardware footprint

This is a real problem that is causing issue with SWMBO (she who must be obeyed) as when everything goes jerky she gets grumpy!

All help and suggestions gratefully received!

Many thanks.

Seems I remember reading something similar in the forum in reference to someone having there status update set to frequent in the server configuration menu. If i rememeber correctly the person had it set to once a minute and it was causing them to see disruptions in video playback. I have mine set to every 30 minutes and it works fine.

Thank you for the suggestion - this is something I tried before posting and it does not resolve the issue.

To recreate the issue - rip two DVD's at the same time - the files will be 'intermingled' on the disk and stuttering will be bad.

Unfortunately I get the same issue locally as I do remotely - the way to fix the problem is to defrag.

It's not an option not to only rip one DVD at a time - as I also have a Nebula TV card that can record up to 11 channels at once in 11 different files ...

No way dude, The alternative is not to stream more than one movie to the same disk at the same time. What are the disk heads supposed to do with 2 or more streams but fragment. You can move the files from one drive to the next to defrag, and in the future, record one file to a drive at a time.

I know what you are saying - but it's not an acceptable solution to ask my non-technical-sleep-deprived-second-child-on-the-way-wife to identify then drag/drop files that are recorded to the tv cards back and forth from a share before viewing them.

My Media HTPC XP box defrags overnight (only taking a few minutes) using JKDefrag.

The situation I am in is that Windows meets the requirement to degragment the file system - and other alternatives do not.

I'd be great to hear any other suggestions you, or others may have.

Would a bootable Linux Live CD such as Knoppix allow me to defrag?

Thanks!