NASLite Network Attached Storage

I'm having enough trouble with my 2 motherboards and trying to track down problems that all seem to be either IRQ or bus speed or who knows what related, that I'm wondering about just moving everything to a new motherboard and starting over. I know some hardware probably works a lot better than others, even if they're both listed as "compatible" officially. So I'm wondering if anyone has a recommendation for a good (preferably inexpensive) motherboard that you have good experience with specifically in a naslite box.

Also, could you mention whether you're happy with the onboard NIC, or are you using a card? If a card, any good suggestions on a fast, inexpensive card?

Primarily I'm doing a lot of moving huge files back and forth, and I'm just not getting good network speeds to/from the naslite box, especially on my IDE drives, which makes me think it may be an IDE bus speed issue. Or it could be a NIC issue. Or who knows. But speeds are fine everywhere else on the network on Windows and Apple machines.

So any advice on boards and cards that you KNOW work really well, don't give you IRQ conflicts (I've got 7 drives in my box) and give you fast transfer speeds? (Did I mention inexpensive? )

Thanks!

Well I am just using an Intel D845EBG2 desktop motherboard with a 2GHz Celeron. and 1GB of RAM. This is a rock solid setup and has not given me one bit of grief for well over 2 years. For the NIC I am using a 3C985SX GigE over fibre to a Alliedtelesyn 12 port gigabit managed switch. All computers are connected to this via UTP CAT5e, again there are no issues.

For the NIC I would go with either a 3Com or an Intel Gigabit card. The Realtek based cards do work but there are so many different chipsets, some work great, others just so so, and then others not at all.

I just setup a NAS server for a friend and it sustained over 62MB/sec from a RAID5 array of 4 250GB Maxtor drives and a 3Ware 4port RAID card. The NIC was an onboard Intel Gigabit and sang!

From my non RAID NAS I get about 38MB/sec and all drives are PATA (IDE) The PATA interface is more than fast enough for the majority of loads you will likely hit the NAS box with. Your problem is likely the IRQs being shared or the BIOS is a mess. Some boards are well designed, from the chips, to the traces, to the BIOS and oters not so much. This is why I chose the Intel board, they make the processor and the chipset, then load a clean BIOS for maximum stability.

There are a number of them on Ebay right now, most come with processor and should not run more than $50.00 to $60.00 to the door.

Hope this helps,

Mike

You get 38MB/sec to non-RAID PATA drives? Seriously?

The fastest I've ever gotten on single large files to/from the nas is 20MB-ish bursts with 10MB sustained - on SATA drives. My PATA drives typically go anywhere 2-5MB (especially slow on writes) and that's with them having to pause every few hundred meg to dump the buffer (at least that's what I assume it's doing when it slows down to almost nothing for a few minutes before speeding back up again).

Am I getting my MB and Mb confused again? Or are you really getting 10x faster speeds on PATA drives than my gigE network gives me on mine?

That is MB as in Mega Bytes.

Your server is having issues that need resolution.

The speeds I get are thanks to the testing of many different pieces of hardware, picking and choosing the best pieces, and then assembling them into my system.

There is more that can go wrong with a system than can go right and getting it there can take time. Some get lucky out of the gate and others struggle for what seems forever to them.

SATA drives are not any faster than PATA drives for the most part, they share the same HDAs so both contend with thedata rate off of the heads being the limiting factor. SATA is superior to PATA in that it has added allot of the capabilities that made SCSI, FC-AL and SAS so fast.

Your issues do not lay in the drives and the interface they use but in your motherboard and the controllers and NIC you are using so forget about the drives and focus on those issues.

Mike

Here is a link to the motherboard that I recently built my server around, and it works flawlessly. Fired right up from the first try, didn't have to configure anything other than making sure that unnecessary items in the bios were turned off, and was a pretty good deal for the processor, board and heatsink/fan.

http://3btech.net/ask8amdse33c1.html