NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hopefully NasLite+ v2.x is coming along nicely ....

My major questions are:

1) How soon ?

2) Will it support beyond the mobo 4 x IDE ....
basically, I want to be able to use some a pair of SATA RAID cards to hook up my drives ( 2x SATA RAID with 2 x drives each), plus hopefully hang a few IDE drives off of the mobo or add on cards. From what I have read ir sounds like (maybe) version 2 will support HW raid cards. With the price of 250GB SATA the same as PATA, plus HW raid cards about $20, it looks like a cheap way to get some more throughput.

3) Will it allow drives to be renamed?

4) Will it allow drives to be joined or spanned (instead of 4 drives, just show as one or two). Since the hardware sees the raid card pair as one drive, it would be nice to have the NasLite span I/O across both cards, thus a R/W to the "drive" would actually be split out to all four disks. Splitting the IO across multiple disks might get some more speed.

Hopefully this will all be in version 2.0 (and soon)

Please let me know.

v2 supports hardware raid cards, the $20 cards your talking about are not true hardware raid, they are software raid cards.

My current test rig is using a LSI Megaraid SATA controller with 3x300 HD in a raid 5 config. Here's a link to the card I'm using.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816118011

My previous test rig was a Dell Poweredge 1750 with a SCSI megaraid card in it.


v2 will not allow the naming of drives on it, itself, however I will be posting some clever ways to doing this on your mac or windows box.

v2 will be done, when it's done

Will RAID-Adaptors like the HP/Compaq Smart-Arrays will be supported?

If they will be supported then maybee I'll keep some of them and also my Compaq Storage

Ralph that RAID card looks excellent however at $283.99 it is perhaps out of reach for most users here.

Is there any hope for a low end (aka cheap) RAID card or perhaps better a plain old SATA cards that just allow more non RAID'd drives to be added.

The 4 port is cheaper. Pretty much any SATA cards will work.

Used 3Ware cards on Ebay are a good bet. The LSI cards are one of the best in class cards and as such you will pay.

Now I wonder if my Mylex eXtreemRAID 5000 FCAL card will work......

Mike

Thanks for the info Ralph ....

I looked over the cards and decided to standardize with 3Ware for now.

Put some stuff together and here is what it looks like ...

Server 01 - Dual P3/1Ghz, 2 Gig Ram,
Array 01 = RAID 0 - Motherboard Promise FastTrak-100, 4x250 GB
Array 02 = RAID 5 - 3Ware 7450-4LP in the 64/66 slot, 4 x 250 GB
Network = Intel dual head Gigabit card in the 64/133 slot

Server 02 - Dual Xeon 2.0, 2 Gig Ram
Array 01 = RAID 0 - Motherboard Promise FastTrak-100, 4x250 GB
Array 02 = RAID 5 - 3Ware 7500-4LP in the 64/66 slot, 4 x 250 GB
Array 03 = RAID 5 - 3Ware 7500-4LP in the 64/66 slot, 4 x 320 GB
Network = Intel dual head Gigabit card in the 64/133 slot

Server 03 - Dual Xeon 2.4, 2 Gig Ram
Array 01 = RAID 0 - Motherboard Promise FastTrak-100, 2x250 GB
Array 02 = RAID 5 - 3Ware 7506-4LP in the 64/66 slot, 4 x 250 GB
Array 03 = RAID 5 - 3Ware 9506-4LP in the 64/66 slot, 4 x 250 GB
Network = Intel dual head Gigabit card in the 64/133 slot

Still up in the air about the network connections.
Since the main system has four gigabit ports, I can see two choices ....

Option 1: Run both gigabit ports for each server to the switch, then hang the main system off the switch.

Option 2: For each system, run one gig port to the switch, then run the second to the main system via a cross-over cable (direct connect)

Any suggestions?

Far as I know NASLite+ doesn't support 2 NICs at the same time.

Speed and reliability wise you might be better off using one cable from each server to the main computers 4 port NIC. You do realize that you are going to flood each Gigabit link and that the hardware may choke if you start to seriously hammer it? Also, most cards and switches now days MDI/MDIX and as such will work with a standard or Xover cable.

Mike

If those boxes are intended to run NASLite, it's overkill. v1 and v2 do not support multiple processors, nic cards or more than 768 megs of ram. Also the motherboard Promise FastTrak is software raid driven, which we do not support since we can't guarantee stability. Hardware raid is fully supported in v2 however.

There is no performance gain from any of that extra hardware for NL. Case in point, when benchmarking v2 against FreeNAS (Which supports all that) on 2 Dell PowerEdge 1730's (Same specs except p4 Zeon's), NASLite v2 was 2x as fast in every area consistantly.

Remember NASLite has been designed as a task specific OS, ie : a file server, it won't suffer from the same things a full blown OS would, yielding time to other processes, swapping/releasing memory for those processes, etc. The primary bottlenecks are the hard drives and ethernet card, I've averaged between 7-80 MB/s reads from various drives and systems, those speeds would never saturate a GigE card at 1000 MB/s.

I like the specs, drop the second processor, dual nic, and less ram and it'll be a nice fast system. My new v2 box is a P3 800, 512M ram, GigE Ethernet, and a SATA MegaRaid card with 3x300 Gig drives in a Raid 5 configuration. I've streamed 4 different videos to 4 different machines at the same time from this box with 0 glitches, from my XP box ran VMWare player opening a XP virtual machine from it and still couldn't see any performance loss.

Whilst this is not a RAID card it is an econmic SATA controller from a good manufacturer at a reasonable price

http://www.supermicro.com/products/acce ... T2-MV8.cfm



based on my googling so far i expect proper hardware RAID cards to be far far too expensive for the hobbiest (e.g. were looking like the RAID cards costing as much as a PC case, motherboard, RAM, Naslite+ put together).

Comments on this card and the quest for a cheaper RAID card?

The 3Ware cards are going for a reasonable price on Ebay. Boat load of the 4 port cards out there.

Mike

Again!

What about real RAID adaptors like the Smart Arrays by Compaq/HP?

Will there be any support?

TIA
Kelsey