Network storage

[Berg]

Originally Posted by lotusvball

There are a couple or reasons why.

1st it is really easy to use. Took 10 minutes to do a complete setup.
2nd it fits on a usb drive and allows for the use of 4 ide drives.
3rd did I mention how easy it was. And $25 is worth the time savings.
4th. IT WAS EASY. no learning linux or trying to tinker with the setup. I don't have the time needed to learn the tiny bit of Linux needed.

If I may, that is only a part of the reason.

IMHO, the most compelling argument is that it is a dedicated "software" package designed and optimized for the sole purpose of running the NAS. NAS Lite (and others) was designed to run on a Linux core but with only the required processes, and optomized to run with the very least overhead possible.

Yes, its easy and painless and all that, but it runs very well on machine that would probably not be able to run any full distro. You possibly could do the same on your own, but most probably not optimized.

The ease of use, reliability of operation and low spec requirements are the reason why NAS Lite and such are a great solution.

My two cents ...

NAS Lite v. 2 will only add to that (I suspect/hope). I'll get off my soap box now ... I just really believe in the product.

[tmiranda]

Like Berg I have drunk the NasLite+ kool-aid. Spend the $25 bucks, it is a bargain for all the reasons outlined. Besides, you will finally have some use for that old 16MB USB drive you have laying around.

I tried out freenas and NASLite+ blows it away when it comes to performance and stability.

I am drooling at the thought of NASLite+ v2 being released. The only downside I can see is that it will only support RAID using hardware RAID cards and they are fairly expensive.

OK, I'll get off the soap box too.....

[jchiso]

Originally Posted by sixdoubleo

Just wondering....

WHy not use Fedora Core or any of the other free Linuxes and do the same thing? While I can understand the need for something like this, for a techie type person, the same exact thing can be done with just plain old Linux...

I have a NASLite server and have experimented with dedicated servers based on several Linux distributions; Xandros, Ubuntu and Slax, and have to say that the amount of reading, configuring and customization required with a non-task-specific distribution is significant when compared to a solution such as NASLite, which takes about ten minutes to set up.

I've not yet tried NASLite+ with a USB drive but suspect it too would be easier and more cost-effective than trying to match its capabilities with any Linux distribution.

[lotusvball]

Version 2.0 has been released.

Hardware RAID support and SATA, external HD Support, etc.

http://www.serverelements.com/

[steingra]

I purchased the NasLite+ Suite, and it was worth every cent!!!!!!!!!! I have some knowledge of linux and am not against learning more. but with so many possible geek projects to work on at any given point in time, I think it is well worth the money to purchase a product like NasLite+.

Support has been good from the developer.

I tried it on several different machines, including older pc's that didnt support booting from a USB thumbdrive. So I used the floppy kicker diskette to bootup the initial naslite OS, and then it was able to boot the full naslite that was installed on the USB thumbdrive (the Naslite Suite allowed me to easily make this floppy kicker disk in no time at all). And in doing so, gave me the ability to use all 4 IDE channels, and 4 hard drives in the older system.

So no hard drives were needed for an OS. Since it was contained on the USB thumb drive.

I also have done the same thing on a newer system (~1.x Ghz AMD based PC) and it works fine. 4 hard drives between 250 and 300GB in size are in use. It was so easy to just plug in a new drive and set it up.

Also another benefit, is that you can remove drives from an older system and just plug them into a newer system and all your data is still there. Naslite will recognize the drive with data on it, and be able to use it immediately. So it was easy to move drives in between systems when I wanted to.

[popechild]

Hey guys, hope someone's still reading this thread and can help me out.

I just setup a NASLite-2 USB box and love it, but it's giving me one problem I can't figure out. I use SageMC, and have a few hundred dvds that until now were on a combination of local and UNC drives.

Examples
D:/Temporary DVDs/DVDs/Movie1
\\DESKTOP\Owned DVDs\DVDs\Movie2

In SageMC, I point the video directories to one level above the "DVDs" folder in each path (ie. \\DESKTOP\Owned DVDs). This way when Sage reads the directory, it sees a folder called "DVDs" in both cases. Within My Videos, if I sort by folder, on the top level I see a folder called "DVDs." Opening that folder gives me both Movie1 & Movie2. (SageMC authomatically combines the contents of folders with the same name.)

My problem is that trying to do the same thing on my NASLite drives isn't working. SageMC is not recognizing the multiple folder levels, but is instead putting everything into the top level of My Videos. For instance:

\\NASLite-2\Disk-0\Owned DVDs\DVDs\Movie1
\\NASLite-2\Disk-0\Owned DVDs\Movie2

In My Videos, I *should* see Movie 2 and a folder called DVDs that has Movie1 in it. Instead, I just see Movie1 & Movie2. I can't figure out a way for SageMC to recognize the folder levels.

Has anyone else noticed this? I tried posting in the SageMC thread, but I'm hoping this thread might actually be seen by people using NASLite who have had to work through this same issue...

Thanks!

EDIT: Nevermind. After deleting the import folders and re-adding them 3 or 4 times, each time getting the same problem, they finally decided to just "click." They're appearing correctly now.

[davey_fl]

My Storage server was a winxp box with 1.5TB but when the C drive went south I decided to give NASlite 2+ USB a try. Setup was easy and I setup the drives as Sage recording directories. The machine is an AMD 3200+ with 512MB Ram, Nforce mobo. Worked fine for the first two days until I started noticing glitches in my recordings. During playback I'd get frequent lockups lasting 1-5 seconds. Deleting files used was very fast but now it takes 5-10 seconds with the sage icon spinning. Last night it started corrupting mpeg files so that 2:30 or 10 second jumps would completely mess up where you were in a show and you could not get back to the correct place. Copying this file over to a windows box and playing it the file does the same thing. Sometimes when trying to play a show it plays a super high FFW speed or really slow speed. Now I've removed all the NAS drives from sage and I've added a couple of drives on one of my windows boxes for sage to record on - we'll see if NAS was the issue, but I suspect it is...

edit: Also I'm running gigabit throughout.

[dragotalon]

I use freenas and a compact flash adapter with a raid 5 SATA II card and celeron 1.2 tualatin and 256 meg and it works great. It took more than 10 min because I set up Raid 5 on the card and you can't use background initializing you have to wait till it finished but after that it took about ten minutes to set it up. I store Dvd's ,Mp3's and HD content with no problem. I use the Promise card because there is support in Freebsd which Freenas is based on.I even have basic permissions set up so anything rated R is not accessible from kids Machines ( it is very basic permissions and only folder level and uses plain text to send). The Promise card takes care of the raid not Freenas so when my drive failed just put in new drive and card rebuilt it without Freenas help at all.( I now use a hot spare so there is no down time.) So 7 300 gig drives work great and 1 300 gig hot spare.