NAS and the home network

[Ted the Penguin]

from what jeff says it looks like 10/100 will be fine, also firewire is a perfectly valid option, and alot of the epia boards that I have been finding have firewire connections

[gEd]

Apparently (from an article I read last year on building a silent EPIA pc) you shouldn't use a CF card for the OS. All those 100000000's of writes (swap file, temp files etc) will kill it prematurely.

[TobyO]

I had tried FreeNAS and got it to work well at first. I used 3 large raid 5 disk, but found them to be unstable. So I downloaded SUSElinux 10.1 for free and installed it with little problems on a XP1800 machaine, 256 RAM with a linksys GB NIC. I don't recomend this GB NIC from linksys because it a little tricky to install. I have the network all on GB speed except the MVP. I use this link box just for storage and not to record on. I have had the linux box up for 9 months with 1 HD failure. I was able to replace the HD and lose nothing and it still function well as it was rebuilding itself. The only trick is to run GB-PVR service as the local user as Tipster outline in using network drives with MVP. I have played the same video or other video to my 2 MVP and 2 GB-PVR clients and GB-PVR at the same time with no problem.
Benifits of a full Linux version is
1) VIEW SMART logs for the HD
2) graffic interface you can print directly from or swap files from GB-PVR
3) Firewall and Antivirus
4) My case with 3 different IDE cards (14 HD) added stability. RAID 5 for raid 0 I don't think it matters.
Down side
1) A little more difficult to install
2) Size, a 64 K drive VS a 20GB Harddrive.

I hope this helps. I know FreeNAS is continuing to improve and i am very interested in how they have improved.

Tobyo

[jksmurf]

I really like malgernon's general concept in post #1. I have an MVP and my GBPVR Serevr (actually my only PC, wife has Notebook) upstairs which feeds it. If I could find a silent PC box OR do what the folks with the NSLU2 do with that NAS device, i.e. UNSling it and put GBPVR on it like they put Twonky and iTunes servers etc. on it, THAT would be just great. We can only dream :-)

k.

[UncleJohnsBand]

I have never tried freenas.....I've been using NASLite for a few years.

Can ayone provide a comparison of the two?

[malgernon]

Apparently (from an article I read last year on building a silent EPIA pc) you shouldn't use a CF card for the OS. All those 100000000's of writes (swap file, temp files etc) will kill it prematurely.

Yes I've heard this but I think there are solutions people are using like RAMDISK. Microsofts own Enhanced Write Filter directly addresses this issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814257/e...sid=global

Also, with Windows 2000 stripped down sufficiently it may be possible to fit it on a comparatively small compact flash card - certainly far less than my initial 2.5 GB installation - making it less expensive to replace the disk every few(?) years

I've been aware of this but its difficult to find hard and fast evidence of the weakness of CF cards specifically holding the OS. I've been running lots of prtable software at work and home from a USB drive for a few years - daily. I even formatted it as NTFS, and its still going strong. I wonder if there really are that many writes to the hard drive by Windows? The hard drive light on my GBPVR machine hardly ever lights up when I'm watching Live TV, and all recordings would be stored elsewhere.

[malgernon]

I have never tried freenas.....I've been using NASLite for a few years.

Can ayone provide a comparison of the two?

I liked FreeNAS' WebGUI that avoided Telnetting in, and once again its optimisation for CF cards. But I haven't really gone beyond the initial 'concept' stage myself. FreeNAS is still flagged as a pre-production release, while NASLite seems to have a bit more pedigree. I'd also be interested to hear how users have fared, but I'd guess only a few are using NAS at the moment on these forums.

[TobyO]

Unclejohn,

Does NASLite v2 support Soft Raid 5? I cannot find the information on the Web site. I know they support RAID 0 and 1.

TobyO

[UncleJohnsBand]

Unclejohn,

Does NASLite v2 support Soft Raid 5? I cannot find the information on the Web site. I know they support RAID 0 and 1.

TobyO

I don't think so....I am using the old standard Naslite version...not even the Naslite+.....

However, I did read through the docs on Naslite2 and found the following information on RAID....they do support Hardware RAID....but the comments at the end would lead me to believe they will not be supporting software based RAID anytime soon.

A Few Words About RAID
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent
(or, originally: Inexpensive) Disks. RAID is used to
get fault tolerance and/or high performance by
combining multiple hard disks. There are several
levels of RAID, not all of which are fully redundant or
fault tolerant. Below is a list of common RAID levels:
• RAID 0 - Bit striping
• RAID 1 - Mirroring
• RAID 3 - Bit striping with parity
• RAID 4 - Block striping with parity
• RAID 5 - Block striping with distributed parity

For server systems, RAID has been common for
years. But also for home computers, RAID can be
very useful. Hard disks crash after a certain period
of time and the manufacturer’s 5 year warranty will
not help in recovering lost data files.

RAID implementations contain components such as
RAID tables defining the configuration of RAID
arrays, data structures to store the descriptors for
cached data, engine(s) for calculating parity and the
logic for handling I/Os to and from RAID arrays.
These components may be implemented in
software, typically in kernel-mode, or embedded
directly in the RAID controller.

There are many arguments one can present
regarding which alternative is better. Generally,
software RAID solutions are less expensive, but do
place a higher workload onto the system processor
as well as require specialized operating system
configuration and maintenance. On the other hand,
hardware RAID handles all RAID-specific tasks
independently of the operating system and requires
little or no specialized configuration.

In the event of failure, RAID arrays must be rebuilt.
The first step is the exchange of the faulty disk with
a new and fully operational replacement. The
second stage is the actual rebuilding of the array.
Often, poorly configured hardware and lack of
administrator proficiency result in data loss. That can
be especially true with software RAID.

Hardware RAID is considerably more robust and
simpler to configure, maintain and operate than
software RAID. Hardware RAID is a superior
solution to software RAID in a networked
environment as is typical for servers. Its benefits are
even more significant when running applications with
high CPU utilization or when operating servers with
marginal or low CPU/RAM resources.

NOTE: RAID of any kind is not a substitute for a
good backup. The purpose of RAID is to provide
performance improvement or media redundancy and
not backup facilities. Deleting files from a RAID
array, for all intent and purposes, is irreversible.

[Hayden]

I've been aware of this but its difficult to find hard and fast evidence of the weakness of CF cards specifically holding the OS. I've been running lots of prtable software at work and home from a USB drive for a few years - daily. I even formatted it as NTFS, and its still going strong. I wonder if there really are that many writes to the hard drive by Windows? The hard drive light on my GBPVR machine hardly ever lights up when I'm watching Live TV, and all recordings would be stored elsewhere.

Another option you could try is BartPE - a stripped down version of XP that is designed to run completely off a CD (ie no writing to the OS disk) and has been adapted to run off USB keys etc.

No idea if you could make GBPVR run OK with it though