NASLite Network Attached Storage

The slow build time might have been because the card was building the array in the background. Alot of them support this so you can get working faster after putting the box together.

As far as the difference between the Adaptec card and the 3Ware card. I have a friend that bought one of the 2400 cards and said it was crap and he could never get it to configure and perform well. Naturaly he didn't want to pay Adaptec for their tech support to tell him the drivers and firmware were crap. I also was talking to a guy that runs a company that uses NOTHING but 3Ware controlers for the machines he runs in the Co-Lo. They run like nothing else for the price and the linux drivers are beyond great. He has like a dozen of them running with no trouble at all.

Good luck with the adaptec card, you'll need it from what I can tell.

Mike

I'll add my vote here.

I have two Adaptec cards (a 2400 and a 2810SA) and a 3Ware 9550-12. The Adaptecs work, but in every respect the 3Ware is faster, more reliable and more widely supported by various OS versions. (unhappily, this particular 3Ware card doesn't work with NASLite, yet.)

I tried to go cheap, but never again. Anyone who's contemplating a -real- RAID card, do yourself a favor and get a 3Ware.

PS
I've also tried a couple High Point cards, which are junk.

Score a second hand LSI megaraid 150-4 or 150-6. The 150-6 is even available with battery backup which means you could use the writeback cache without data loss issues. This also speeds up operation _a lot_.

Other good choices are 3Ware cards from the 7000, 7500, 8000 or 8500 series. The 95xx series would be a good choice but is not supported (fix).

The 7xxx and 80xx series are ATA, the 95xx and 85xx series are SATA cards. Newer cards faster then the older ofcourse. Still, a 9500-8 with a 6 disk raid 10 should push you in the 100MB/sec writes and 160MB/sec sequential writes and reads. e.g. Enough to saturate GigE.

A 7500-8 is clocked here in a 4 disk raid 10 with ~ 50MB/s writes and 90MB/sec reads. This a older generation card. Raid 5 not recommended
Limited by a 32Bit 33Mhz PCI slot though.

The LSI MegaRAID i4 doesn't seem to work. I am going to look into it a bit more this evening but....

Mike

Well, I've won the eBay auction for the 3Ware 8506-12 channel card! Thanks to my sniping program

Now I need a recommendation for a mobo that will do it justice. I would like to have GIG lan,so the first question is: "Is an on-board gig nic as good as a PCI-X card one?"

Of course I don't need on board RAID so what to get? Oh I have an AMD64/FX chip 939 pin.

I have been looking around the various test forums, like Toms, but there is just so many mobos out there...

Most of the baords out there for the Athlon64 chip are going to have a gigabit NIC on them. The real question will be are the drivers there for that NIC in NL2.0? It is about the only thing that will matter as you will not be using anything else on the board. Turn it all off or disable it. I like the Tyan and Asus MBs. I have also used the Epoc and and Intel MBs. The Intels are out here for obvious reasons. You will want to be looking for a MB that hopefully has a split PCI-X bus. That is to say that the Gigabit NIC is on say bus A and the 3Ware card is on bus B. Not much of an issue though since the bus will be more than fast enough to get the job done either way.

Here is the rub. The socket 939 processor MB is generaly not going to have a 64Bit/133MHz PCI-X bus on it. Most are going to be Socket 940 Opterons. I have the S2895 but it HURT to buy. At $620.00 USD it may be a bit to much. I might be looking for a used server on EBay. This may be the best way to go cost wise and it will generaly be a hell of a box for a NAS server like you're building.

Mike

The card, LSI MegaRAID 511 i4.

It doesn't seem to work and I don't know what else I could do. I configured the drives via the onboard utility. Initialized the array. Booted into a Linux from scratch disk and fdisked the logical drive. I then formated the drive with the drive EXT2. I created a mount point in the temp file system and mounted the drive to it. I could copy and read data from it. I have to assume that the array is functional and working. NL2.0 still refuses to see the array or mount it. It does load drivers for the card and I can see no errors.

Where to go from here?

Mike

Well, my wallet is not a bottomless pitt, so I ain't buying an Opteron or a secondhand server! I could however buy a GIG nic 64 bit card, say from Netgear(?). Is there a list of Gig nics supported by NASLITE2? Or at least a networking chipset?

Do most PCI-X mobo's have 2 x64bit slots? One for the 3Ware RAID and the other for a 64 bit Gig NIC?

Are the on-board Gig NICs, wired in a 64bit bus?

Cheers,

You will not need to worry about the bus width and speed with the built on NIC. Your concern will be finding a MB that has 64bit PCI-X slots. there are alot of very good servers on Ebay every day that go for far cheaper than you can build a box for, even though you have the Processor already. You may want to reconsider and have a look. You may save a bit of cash and get a hell of a box to boot.

Mike

There's a NASLite-2 Harware Reference Guide that documents what works and what doesn't - as for the rest of the questions - that's going to depend on the specific motherboard you choose.

The 3ware 8506-12 card arrived today! I am now running a 3ware BIOS RAID 5 build, and got to wondering if this was the correct way to do thing for NASLITE2?

Do I create the RAID array from the card's BIOS, and then run NASLITE2, or does NASLITE2 create the array according to its own settings?

Please advise... Thnx.

You use the RAID cards utility to do the formating and then it exports the array as one drive that NL2.0 sees.

Mike

I have it all working! Discovered that the 3ware 8506 PCI-X card actually works fine on a norlam PCI slot, thereby saving me having to buy a new mobo.

With a $25 gig nic I am writing at a peak network speed of 280 mbps and averaging around 160 mbps. Bloody fantastic!

Could some tell me if NASLITE2 uses both cores of a dual core AMD 64/FX2 or is the second core sitting idle?

Thanks.

Hi Paul,

The dual CPUs or a dual core CPU is overkill. A fast bus and lots of RAM will likely do much more for your performance than a fast CPU. Most of my NASLite servers use a very sufficient 800MHz VIA C3, so I can vouch for performance without a high-powered CPU.

Since a fast processor is not necessary for high-speed throughput, the NASLite kernel is compiled for a single CPU. Therefore dual core processors will run on a single core.

Hope that helps