The biggest factor in overall speed performance, in my experience with NASLite, is choosing the right mainboard.
If the BIOS does not natively support the size of the hard drives you will be using, you have to configure the BIOS with NO hard drives installed, and let NASLite handle everything on it's own. Doing this results in a maximum of 33MB/s transfer speeds, which is the default setting on the mainboard.
If your BIOS will support the drives you intend to use, then configure them in the BIOS, and select either 33/66/100/133 UDMA speeds, the faster the better. Although I have not tested this, I would think that if you were using mixed drives with different speed capabilities, you would be advised to keep slower drives on the same channel, and faster drives on the same channel, but that is just a theory, since my drives are all identical.
128 Mb of ram is more than enough.
According to the sytem specs on my NASLite box:
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131072 = 128MB installed on Mainboard
- 7885 = Ramdisk set up for NASLite system (5MB used / 2.7MB free)
= 123187 = available for I/O buffers
- 121732 = 4248 I/O buffers created by NASLite (more than enough)
= 1455 = Ram free (+ 2.7MB unused in Ramdisk)
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Also remember that the onboard cache size of the CPU affects performance. A celeron has a smaller cache than a P3, even at the same clock speeds, so the P3 will give slightly better throughput.
On my 733Mhz P3 NASLite box, with 128MB, and four 200GB Maxtor drives configured in BIOS for UDMA 100MB/s, I can stream MPEG4 video to as many as 5 seperate machines on a hardwired 10/100 Ethernet connection with no discernable lags in any of the machines. I suppose I could upgrade to gigabit Ethernet, but so far, this has not been an issue. Since my NASLite server functions as remote storage for the workstations on my network, there is very little incidence of 'high demand' on it.
Conclusions:
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1) By all means, use whatever spare equipment you have lying around to build a NASLite box. Depending upon what equipment you use, you will get varying levels of performance.
2) Fo most users, the NASLite box will spend most of it's time doing absolutely nothing. Even with 10 machines on my SOHO lan, the demands on the NASLite box most of the time are small or nothing.
3) If you must BUY components for your NASLite box, the mainboard, and it's BIOS, are the most critical component. The more modern the mainboard, the more likely it will support larger hard drives in the BIOS, and the more likely you will be able to use the higher UDMA speeds, which result in overall superior performance.
4) CPU speed is secondary to the mainboard used. I.E, a faster processor in a board that only supports UDMA 33MB/s will give less performance than a slower processor in a board that supports UDMA 66/100MB/s.
5)Use whatever RAM you have available. No need to go out and buy a 128MB stick of ram if you already have a 256MB stick. But 128MB seems to be the "sweet spot". Anything more is overkill.
Just my 2 cents worth...
DaveJ45
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