NASLite Network Attached Storage

Does anybody know if any version of nas lite supports the folowing chipset
Intel P35 + ICH9R as i am looking at building a new server with the following board
and 1 GIG of ram

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/M ... -us0000337

I know that i will have to use a NIC card in the IDE slot, i am more interested in the 6 SATA II
ports and the bus speed.

Any Comments or sugestions

Steve

You are kidding, Right?

That machine will be such overkill that it isn't even funny. First, a 1Gigabit NIC will push a max of about 80MB/sec, this is assuming that the drive subsystem is up to the task. Second, You would need a HARDWARE RAID card (3Ware are a great choice here) and a number of drives in one of the following, RAID0, RAID10, RAID5, or RAID50.
The only part that you have right as far as I can tell is in that you are planning on installing 1GB of RAM. The processor is at most a minor player in the performance of the NAS box and you do not need allot of power there to get a smoking server setup. Spend it on the RAID card and drives.

I get routine transfers of upwards of 30MB/sec sustained from just a simple single drive and a 1Gb 3Com NIC. If I have a RAID setup I bet it would go up to around 60MB/sec with a bit of tunning of the array parameters. There is no need to chase a massive FSB or high core speeds.

Mike

Correct me if i am wrong on this one,

the reasons for this choice are

800 Mhz bus speed on a P4 cpu SATA Drive speed abou 1500 Mb sec
so there should be no bottle neck there and reading on formus here in future possable support for Pcie network cards so through put there will be good

and my computer parts supplier offers this mother board and a P4 with 1Gig ram for a good price and 3 Year warranty

i am planning to build a new sever to cope with large traffic and large file size

why would i need a hardware raid card when ther are 6 sata ports on the motherboard ?

steve

NASLite does NOT support software raid which is what your motherboard offers. You need a separate raid controller with a dedicated XOR processor in order to get RAID support in NASLite. Not sure what you mean with 1500MB/s but regardless of internal bandwith the network interface will be a bottleneck if you go above ~100MB/s (theoretical max is 125MB/s).

Your limiting factors will be the Gigabit NIC, pure and simple. The FSB is of no importance on modern hardware and in fact I have gotten the same general performance from my old PIII 450MHz machine as I do from the P4 2GHz Celeron. Memory and drive transfer speeds are much more important. Most of the quoted speeds are theoretical and in reality are not very close to the true performance one could expect from them. Try not to get caught up in the marketing hype the manufacturers whip up to try and sell product, most of it is BS.

As has been said time and time again, NL does NOT support software RAID cards. Unless it has a processor (likely an Intel RISC processor) it is software based and will not work with NL. This means any RAID cards built on to the mother board are software based and will not function beyond the simple controller function. (I know, shut up about "ZCR" or "Zero Channel RAID" solutions)

Hope this helps,

Mike

Not too fussed about software raid funtion, will set up to mirror drives (If this is not the way to go please say so )
Just want to use mother boards sata connections and have a fast throughtput using a gig card

If by mirror drives you mean the included function in NASLite (which by the way has nothing to do with the RAID-1 "mirror") then yes. That function is a more of a scheduled backup than a mirror. You will get no raid function with your motherboard.

Went for it and built new nas server
Above board
1 Gig Ram
Netgear Gig Nic card
2 x 500GB Western Digital Caviar Sata II

Getting 900 Kbs Sec transfer rates in telnet sessions

WELL HAPPY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You got some diskwriggler numbers for us?

Will do .
That build is not mine so hopefully will get some disk wriggler figures for you this week

here you go..
Bit dissapointed with figures had better
some network traffic at time of test

You are actually getting about the average speed that one can expect from a single drive. The performance is about par but if you crave more then you will need to go with a hardware RAID card and multiple drives in an array.

Mike

if i am only getting 80Mb why dose natliste say other wise ?


sent 365208094 bytes received 13298 bytes 1219437.04 bytes/sec <<<<<<<<<< 1 Gig/sec ???
total size is 103098665800 speedup is 282.29
Close transport agent: Code (0)
Mirror Details Log: MIRROR LOG
Close Mirror Event: Thu Jan 8 00:05:01 UTC 2009

steve

First off, I think you might be confusing the frames/second with the GB/second. Second I think you may be getting a bit confused about the MB/sec Mb/sec GB/sec Gb/sec thing. The units you use are a bit inconsistent with general form and it makes it confusing sometimes to try and figure out if you are getting good numbers or not. From the above diskwriggler run you appear to be averaging about 54MB/sec (in a less conventional notation that would be 432Mb/sec) on the writes, a fairly good number to be honest for a single drive. The reads are the perplexing number here with average being around 28.5MB/sec (Again 228Mb/sec) and this is way off from what most experience, that being that the reads are always faster than the writes. I would be looking into that if it were my rig.

There are a number of factors that will have an effect on your numbers. these are generalities and are by no means comprehensive.

The first is the drives themselves, how fast are they in the raw? The reality of it is that they are generally never as fast as the quoted numbers by the manufacture.

Second, is the drive interface on the MB or add on card a based on a stable and industry standard? If you are using those on the MB they are likely fairly good, this is not to say that they are great. If on the other hand you are using a card by a no name with one of the commodity chips then you may have issues. The SATA standard does allow for "fanning out" or te use of a port multiplier of a single port and this could lead bottle necks in performance. In essence you have one SATA channel, worst case 1.5Gb/sec doing the I/O for 2, 4, 0r even 6 drives.

Third, the drivers. If they are poor then you are going to have no end of trouble.

Fourth is cheep hardware. Poor quality connectors and power supplies can cause so much havoc with performance and stability that you will get to the point of throwing out the old hardware and starting anew.

In your case I think you may want to pop for a 3Ware or Adaptec SATA RAID card and not use the on board interfaces. Another thing I might do is flash the BIOS to the latest version from Foxconn.

My experience is that the closer to the standard Intel hardware a computer is, the better it runs Linux and by extension NASLite.

Another area is the switch you are using. Allot of the consumer level switches are based again on commodity chips, some of which are dubious in their performance to say the least. If you have an 8 port switch, from a technical stand point it would need a real 8Gb/sec of back plane bandwidth to be able to move full duplex packet streams at wire speed. Cheap switches rarely perform to the specs on the box or even near it. For the general users this is just fine since playing music or watching a video off of ones drive is not much of a load. Not so with hardware like yours and mine and a stripped down, well tuned file server like NL. The cracks will start to show, the question is: Do you want to spend the money to keep them from showing up in the first place?

Last, you don't tell us what kind of a client you are using. All your issues may well stem from that one thing. More info is needed.

Mike