NASLite Network Attached Storage

I am familiar with the difference between Advertised capacity and Formated capacity, but I think I'm having a different issue. I have been using a WD 250Gb hard drive which Naslite+ has formated to 223Gb. OK, I can live with the loss of almost 30Gb on that drive, but I just installed a Seagate 400Gb disc and it was formated to 336Gb. This looks to be WAY too much loss to be normal. I've tried to rule out the limitations of the Motherboard by booting Naslite on a Dell L800r, a Sony Vaio PCV-RX550 and finally a Gateway 2000 server tower with no better results. I've tried setting HD detection to "none" and "auto" with no change. The Seagate Disc tools show it to be a 400Gb drive.

I searched the forums and found some people are getting in the range of 396Gb for the same 400Gb drive. Do I need to use a newer computer for Naslite to "see" all 400 gigs? If I partition the drive into two 200Gb slices would that fix the problem?

Thanks in advance for any direction you can provide.

Love the program!

J

Hello Jmonti:

You can not partition into 2 logical drives (as far as I am aware) ... NASLite would not be able to see the two separate partitions ... beside which NASLite has no option to do such partitioning. If you were to use a third-party program to do it ... I bet NASLite would see only the first one, if it even works.

Since you know about the difference in advertised versus formatted capacity ... be aware also that your reported GB numbers are very subjective and to make sure (when you are quoting other people's numbers) that you are comparing apples-to-apples.

I have three drives advertised as 200, 300 and 500. In the NASLite page "Server Storage" they show up with "TOTAL" of 183.4, 275.1 and 458.4. The loss on the 500GB Seagate third drive ... seems huge. But when I look at the "Server Message Log" I get (respectively for the 3 drives):
390721968 sectors (200050 MB)
586114704 sectors (300091 MB)
976773168 512-byte hdwr sectors (500108 MB)

I'm no expert, but when formatting a larger drive under Unix/Linux much space is allocated for reliability reasons to redundant file allocation tables. The 500108 MB obviously does not take this into account, and I bet neither do the 396 to 400 gb claims by others you referenced (they just have a different way of stating their numbers).

But ... I would agree that in your case 336 on 400GB is too much loss.

Try a third party utility to "wipe" the drive and reformat with NASLite. I do not like the Seagate Tools ... I've had the CD install their drive overlay software without my noticing ... but you could use it to "low-level format" the drive. Better yet use something like "KillDisk" (http://www.killdisk.com/).

Hope this will "make your drive bigger" ...

Georg

Hi georg,

Thank you for your reply. As it turns out, I am in the process of Zeroing out the Seagate drive now. Could the problem be that I thew the drive into my Naslite+ box without doing any formating to it first? I just opened it up and hooked it up.

After the Zeroing is complete, I will boot into Partition Magic and fprmat the whole drive in Ex2. I'll then install it in the Dell L800r and see what happens.

Thanks,

J

J:

Yes, not formatting first may have caused an issue.

No ... do *NOT* use PM to format first (that might just introduce additional unknowns). After zeroing the drive ... use NASLite directly to format, then apply a journal, then reboot.

And you typically do NOT have to wait for the entire drive to zero out ... it's useful, but unless something very unusual was done with the drive, just wiping the first 5% or so is enough (it wipes the partition tables, boot sector etc, past the first 1,024 cylinders).

Georg

georg,

Thanks for the heads-up! I'm going to wait for the zeroing to finish ( I'm neurotic like that) but then I'll format with Naslite. You mentioned format *then* Journal. I'm not sure I understand the difference. I think last time I did it, Naslite told me the drive was not set up so it formated the drive for me and then I rebooted the system. I dont remember seeing a second operation before the reboot.

Is there something I'm missing?

J

Jmonti:

Oops ... are you using version 1.x or 2.0x ? Journalling is available under 2.0x ...

In case you have 2.0x: Journaling is a reliability-related feature good to have. I don't recall whether formatting alone (option 8 in the "Disk-X Configuration Menu") automatically creates a journal ... but I always do option 7 ("Apply Journal") right after before I reboot.

So ... no, maybe it wasn't YOU that was missing something ... it was ME (if you have 1.x).

Georg

georg,

I was following the thread and I didnt even realise, and it totally slipped my mind that the add journal is not present in Naslite+

gaiden: yeah ... "slips" seem to happen more to me too, nowadays.

Jmonti: let us know how "big" your drives are now.

Georg

Sorry for the long delay in my posting.....

I've done some more research and looks like 366 Gb is all I'm going to see. I've read other reviews and posts regarding this drive, and the most anyone has gotten is 377Gb. In fact, going by Seagate's website, you loose 7 Gb for every 100Gb due to the whole "1000 is not 1024" discrepancy( much larger than I assumed ). Taking that into account, I should have a drive measuring 372Gb. I guess 366 isn't too far off.

After zeroing the drive and using Naslite+ v- 1.5 to format, I have the same 366Gb.

The drive itself seems fine. I've been able to stream movies to my Macbook over WiFi into my TV using FrontRow with no issues at all.

My biggest headache right now is permissions for the files I transfered to the new drive. I booted up PC Linux with the old and new drives installed and simply transfered the contents from one to the other ( 143Gb worth). The files can be read from Mac and PC, but I can't write to them or delete them........ I can only write new folders on the root of the drive to store new content. So I'm in the process of copying the files to my PC temporarily while I wipe the drive and transfer them back. What a pain!

Thanks again for the help.

J

Hi Jmonti,

are you aware that if you go though Disks the contents are Read only.
you need to go though Disk-1 etc these are Read/Write.

Disk-1 Read/Write
Disks Read only
Info

Hello Gaiden,

Yes, I always set up the mount link to the actual "Disk-1" and not the "discs". I believe my problem has something to do with permissions placed on the files by PC Linux when I transfered them to the new drive as root. I did this because moving 143Gb from one drive to another by way of a networked PC would have taken 100 or so hours Yikes!!!. Its strange though. If I do a "get info" on the directories from my mac, it shows as read/write with no way to change or modify the permissions from there. These directories are somehow "locked" on the drive. I can make new directories on the root of the drive and add files to them just fine, but I cant modify the transfered directories in any way at all.

I'm hoping that by transferring all these files to my Vista PC, reformatting the Nas drive and re- importing the files back to the Nas will take care of this problem.

J

Jmonti:

Glad to hear about the "growth" ... 366 is a lot better than 336.

Note: The transfer of 143GB at 9MB/sec (effective rate on 100Mbit/sec "regular" ethernet) should take "only" 4.5 hours. I've seen as low as 5MB/sec ... that's still only about 8 hours.

Georg

Georg,

Yes, I was glad to see a few more gigs there.

When I was attempting that transfer, the 143Gb of files were on "Disk-1" and I was moving them to "Disk-2". I believe it was going to take so long because in affect, I was retrieving the files from Disk-1 to my PC's memory and the re-transferring them to Disk-2 instead of directly going from Disk-1 to Disk-2 by way of the ATA cable and memory in the nas box.

I may be completely wrong about that though.....

J

Jmonti,

you can move the files between shares and this will move the files on the local server over the ide. this is ideal for the smaller files but if u have any over a few gig then the move will fail..

So if u got lots of small files move them between shares, i.e open the shares of each disk and do cut and paste.

gaiden,

I tried that initially but it failed just as you said. The error message was something to the effect "cant read / write from same source". I took that to mean you cant read from one disk and write to the other simultaneously. I also may have some .ISO images in there over the 2Gb. Maybe that was the cause.

J