NASLite Network Attached Storage

so ... after "beta testing for about 2 years
i finally decided i need to upgrade my server
so i bought naslite 2cdd

all is fine and dandy

BUT ....

read/write performance is 50% network at tops (and even that is not full flat 50% but erratic with max at 50% of 100mbit)

the hdd's certainly can do better than 50/8 = 6,25mbyte/sec

when copying between 2 pc's in my network i get 70 to 75% (about 9mbyte/sec) and thats with an even older hdd

the server-hardware is rather old thou
it's a "digital 3000" pentium 100, 256mb ram
...
and now the clue (i guess i actually know what the problem is, just want a second oppinion from you guys)
...
the nas has 2 pci and 2 isa slots (on a riser)
i have the suspicion the pci-ports are shared
1 pci is the networkcard, the other is a promise-fasttrack something

it looks like it's reading from network THEN writing to disk THEN reading again from network....

as you can see i like asking the obvious

Well, you are probably right. If you look at the network graph on your XP machine, if it looks like a saw-tooth rather than level at peek, then that may be the case. Another thing to consider is the IDE speed. Take a look at the syslog in the stats and make sure DMA is available and at what rate.

oh it's a saw tooth allright
syslog reports udma(100)

but my own question made me think wether to tos out the promise and just use the onboard dma33 (which might be faster afterall in this case)

but now i have to restart the server which is quite a hassle
since the digital thinks it HAS to first try and boot the floppy instead of the cd (even thou cd is primary boot device)

so now i have to keep the floppy out until the cdrom starts booting everytime (which sucks.. installing keyboard and monitor everytime)

Perhaps that box will do better with the USB and kicker

Ah! Is the CD on the promise? If so, try connecting it on the onboard IDE.

no, cdrom was already at onboard ide

well now
i changed the drives to the onboard
1st is master primary
2nd is master secondairy
cdrom is slave secondairy

much better results already
(also found i was getting detection errors from the promise sometimes, maybe broken device? or flakey drivers?)

anyway, speed was just a tad above 50% but no real sawtooth this time
now i chaged the cpu from pentium100 to a mm166 (oc'ed to 200)
now i'm in the range of 6*%

so cpu is very important with this setup

i have a handfull of those old pentium's laying around
go search for a 233mm i should have somewhere
all should be reasonable acceptabel after that

(thou upload is significantly slower than download )

thnx tony for keeping me busy (and thinking)

Some last thoughts: Keep in mind that IDE is CPU-driven so there will be an impact at those low clock speeds. Also, some cheaper NICs tend to be pretty noisy with interrupts. That can also cause some slowdowns with lower frequency CPUs. You can run tests with different NICs on the 100MHz CPU and see if there is a difference in transfer speed. That should provide some clues on what may be a best scenario with the boxes you are using. Another factor is the CPU cache size. You can really tune things just right in order to run lowest specs possible and still saturate your 100.

Hope that helps.

here's what i got now (through http)

noticed ftp is more erratic but overal slightly faster (even hitting the 91% every now and then)



nic is intel-pro 100 btw (could check some other card's as well, but not today it's 23:50 over here)

-edit
yellow is download, red upload

I'll keep the Intel NIC since those are pretty good. With a P200 or P233 you should match the windows clients. You may also try shutting the services you don't want in order to reduce the CPU load. Otherwise, the result is not too bad for a dinosaur. I assume that graph is with the 160MHz?

actually thats the 233mmx now, but the 166 was about the same

i keep having one problem thou (like some others)
browsing network is.. well, troublesome
sometimes it works and the next i no longer can look up anything in the network-neighbourhood

first i thought it's a problem with the pc upstairs
but now all of the sudden i can't even see it anymore downstairs, which worked fine a few minutes ago (didn't change a thing, didn't reboot either, just suddenly stopped)