NASLite Network Attached Storage

I would like advice on what would be the best h/w configuration for NASLITE2+ bearing in mind that there are points of performance above which things are wasted and do not give any measurable improvements.

I envisige GIG NIC PC with 4 HDDs in RAID 5. Of course disk capacity is chosen on space not speed requirements, so here are my questions as I think about this:

32 bit or 64 bit cpu, and is there any benefit in dual core?

what is max clock speed that is beneficial?

how much ram to use, above which amount it is just a waste?

what is max ram speed that still gives benefit?

what is best cost effective RAID card that is known to work in RAID 5 with NASLite2+?

what motherboards (brand/model) are known to work with what brand USB memory for booting without a kicker FD?

In otherwords, what would give the fastest and most reliable appliance?

Cheers,

Paul,

I am running an Athlon 3000 XP+ with 512Mb of memory on an ABIT uGuru Mobo.

A DELL CERC SATA 6 Port Hardware RAID Card (Adaptec 2610SA).

D-Link DGE-530 1Gbit PCI Ethernet Adapter (Marvell Chipset).

All has been running for 8 hours so far with no problems and I have transferred about 275Gb of data to the RAID5 set.

Will keep you posted.

Tim.

Thanks for responding, what data speed do you get?

I am actually looking for more technical information rather than anecdotal. i.e. preferably "no memory is used above 256 MB" rather than "I have 1 GB ram and the system works", if you know what I mean?

It is easy to just say what works, but it doesn't define what is wasted! And that is what information I am after.

Another example would be along the lines of "changing from a 1 GHz Celeron to 2.7 GHz Celeron improves speed, but changing that to a P4 makes no further difference".

NOTE: All of the above are just examples, not true statements.

As far as memory goes, whatever NASLite doesn't use for the kernal is used for buffers. You can figure how much "buffer time" you have by taking how much memory you have and dividing it by your ethernet transfer rate.

For example if you have 1 GB of memory and a 1Gig ethernet interface, your transfer rate on ethernet will max out about 80MB/sec. So if all the buffers are filled, it will take about 12.5 seconds to empty them out at 80MB/sec.

Same thing to fill them up when writing.

Even with 256MB of RAM it will take over 3 seconds to empty/fill all the buffers. Anything over 256MB is probably a waste as far as increasing speeds goes.

With 100MBit ethernet you can multiply the buffer times by 10.

On the flip side of that, if you only have a small amount of buffers and write a 4GB DVD image to NASLite, it will have to wait when the buffers get filled up until the disk can catch up writing the data. So if you're going to be writing large files most of the time, a larger amount of RAM will speed things up until the buffers are filled.

For processor speed, anything over 1GHz is probably a waste. The processor really doesn't have that much to do, so it will be idle most of the time. Higher processor speeds are just going to use more power = more heat.

What will make a huge difference in your transfer speeds is the speed of your disks and the controller you use. An PATA 33MHz controller or disk is obviously going to perform worse than an PATA 133MHz controller and disk. This is where the real bottleneck is in a NAS system.

Thanks, that was just the type of info I was after.

I have decided to build a NASLite 2 PC from scratch.

I am thinking of an Adaptec 2610SA and looking for a motherboard with good on board gig nic and pci-X. Any suggestions?

I hadn't got the Adaptec yet, so if someone would recommend a better alternative pls do so (soon, as I saw a 2610SA on eBay).

Thanks in advance,

I just went through this exercise.

The mobo should not be any problem. If it has PCI Express then it means that future RAID controllers for that interface will work.

You should search the forum for the Adaptec 2610SA. It seems some people had problems..... I was also looking at it and I switched my preference to 3ware. I am currently running an 8port 7500 ATA. The SATA version is the 8500/8506 with the 8506 being newer and probably faster if used in a 64bit PCI slot(not PCI Express).

With that many disks you should pay attention to the case ventilation and drive mounts...

Presently I am running an old AMD Duron700. I was running it on a Celeron400. There was no major speed increase noticed. I do think that the increase from 128MB to 192MB did speed things up a few percentage points though. The NIC I am using is a NetGear GA621 GigaBit Fibre card and it works beyond great. I highly recomend Fibre for servers as it is cheap and much more reliable than copper.

I have a RAID card comming today, an LSI 511 MegaRAID i4, and should be able to give a bit more performance info later today after I get it installed and configured. This card supports up to 8 drives on 4 channels and is ATA100 on each. I can tell you that the box is as fast as local drives seem to be. Sequential transfers come at around 15MB/sec from one disk. As far as Adaptec I used to be a big fan, not any more. They make you prepay $80.00 for customer service if you need ANY tech support, even warranty. Only after THEY determine that it was in contract do they take their time to refund the money. LSI, Qlogic, Mylex, and Emulex all have very good and helpfull tech supoort and I have yet to be asked for money by them. Personaly I wouldn't buy another Adaptec product and I used to be a rabid fan and supporter.

Mike

Does NASLITE2 recognise any RAID chips on motherboards? The ASUS A8V-MX has RAID 5 on the mobo.

Are the mobo RAID solutions any good???

I've got an offer in for AUD 200 (roughly USD150) for an Adaptec 2610SA - is that a reasonable price? I read some negative comments, but also that there are happy users of this, should I buy for this price or pay more and get an 3Ware 8506 (USD250 plus ship)??

Motherboard RAID is not full hardware RAID and as such it is not supported by Naslite.

Mobo RAID depends on the drivers under each OS to perform much of the RAID logic and as such can be prone to damaged RAID arrays in the event of OS crashes etc... I briefly used mobo RAID 1 under WinXP without problems. I find it more useful to not have RAID 1 and have image backups of Windows partitions. This is the ultimate in protection in my opinion and has saved me a number of times.

150 USD for a 2610SA is about the max you would want to pay. I ve seen them go for as low as 120 in some auctions.

If you can wait, do so, and see if an 8506 comes out in September. There were quite a few of them that went for as little as USD200 in July. Even and 8500 should be good enough.

Do you not recommend the 2610SA? The price I mentioned is locally offered, whereas shipping from the US to here in Australia, can often add another $50 !

What do you think of the slightly adapted proverb: An Adaptec in the hand is worth two 3ware in the bush? hehe?

Paul, I am not in a position to recommend or not a card that I haven't tried such as the 2610.

My first purchase was an Adaptec 2400A. It was running OK, but I did notice that it was a bit slow. It took a full 24hrs to built the initial RAID5 array, 4x300Gb Drives. From what I have read, the 2610 has the same chip, an Intel i960. The linux driver is also said to create problems if the writeback cache is enabled.

Out of concern I splurged and bought a new $150 3ware 7500. The initial RAID5 built with 8x300Gb drives took just under 4 hours.

In day to day operation, the 3ware is much faster.

Thanks for the info. I'll try to find a 3ware card then...

Except, I haven't been able to identify a 3Ware SATA RAID 5 card except the 9000 series which is not supported by NASLITE2.

So I ask: "what is a tried and tested SATA RAID card for NASLITE2, that has 4 or more drive support in RAID5?"

Do a search on ebay for "3ware 8506" that should turn out a couple of hits.

Today I got only 1 hit and that was for a 12 channel card! That's way over what I need, but...

However Googling around I came accros a very interesting thread:

http://www.2cpu.com/forums/showthread.php?t=48439

rather worrying. (Ignore the video questions, just read about the errors).

I still hadn't got any response back from anyone using an Adaptec 2610SA.

The locally eBay'ed one is still tempting, as I could pick it up in person, from the city, which is only 3 stops on the train.

This all seems almost too hard!