Re: Home NAS, homebuilt or off the shelf

The message <jIKdnW64WdrErWXanZ2dnUVZ8t2snZ2d@xxxxxx>
from "Dr.Hal0nf1r£$" <femail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
contains these words:

Grooove wrote:
"Dr.Hal0nf1r£$" <femail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:F5SdnQ0TtdNkemraRVnyhAA@xxxxxx:

Your best bet would seem to be to convert an old computer into a home
server and network it to your existing computer(s). You won't need
anything particularly powerful for this; even a Sempron would be more
than requirements. Add lots of extra disk space in whatever way you
think best (Suggestion: Keep the operating system on a small seperate
disk.) and use something like Microsoft Home Server as an operating
system.


If you want to keep the costs down even more then you may be
interested in the Linux path:

http://www.freenas.org/

I agree: In this case Linux is probably the best way to proceed, using the
suggested FreeNAS distro.

I'm using an AMD XP2500+ Barton underclocked _and_ undervolted (the
minimum of 1.1v) in a Jetway V800DAP MoBo (the spare to my desktop PC),
with a Netgear Gigabit ethernet card and four PATA disks (2x 400GB and
2x 500GB drives). The power consumption is 72 watts (it used to be a
mere 52 watts with four 320GB pata drives in an older socket7 MoBo and
an underclocked K6/500 running at 250 MHz with a Vcore set at 1.35v).

I was forced to go for the "overkill" option (665MHz clocked Barton -
normal speed being 1833MHz) on account the Gigabit ethernet upgrade
provided only a slight improvement from the 6.8MB/s ethernet data
transfer speed with 100Mbps to a mere 10.5MB/s (sharing the PCI bus with
a seperate Promise controller _and_ the gigabit card was producing just
too much traffic contention).

The Barton chip was, conveniently, one of the earlier unlocked models
and the MoBo happened to support both underclocking and, most
importantly, undervolting as well as modern IDE and sata interfaces with
LBA48 support (but only a standard 100Mbps built-in ethernet interface).
However, the add-in gigabit card gave a vast improvement in this setup
(still only a best of 25 MB/s transfers win2k to win2k testing).

I started out with version 0.64, installing initially to a small system
partition on the first hard drive, but soon pressed an old 64MB SD card
in a usb2 attached card reader I stuck into the spare 5 1/4 inch drive
bay into service. This allowed me to leave the cdrom disconnected (to
save 2 or 3 watts) and still upgrade via the web console using a
succession of image files.

The only problem with upgrading this way is that the process doesn't
seem to allow the reverting back of an upgrade that may have made things
worse as the latest two updates seem to have done (I'm now back down to
6.8MB/s transfers for read operations and a mere 5.5MB/s for write
operations :-( This despite the lan interface (as well as the gigabit
ethernet switch) showing _every_ possible indication that it's still
working at gigabit speed!

Previous updates showed mostly niggling problems such as the habit, on
two seperate win2k boxes, of showing the mapped server drives as being
disconnected yet would open ok and then show connected for a few minutes
of further idle time. Each update gave me hope that such bugs would be
resolved. Unfortunately each update has failed to resolve the important
issues and in fact simply made things worse (with the latest two being a
case in point). I'm now at version 0.686.3.3011 with, seemingly no easy
way to revert back to a 'Happier Time'(tm).

Unless someone here can suggest a method of properly transferring an
earlier image onto that 64MB SD card, it looks like I'm going to have to
reconnect the CD and install from the latest cd I have to hand and work
up to the optimum flash image, probably overshooting in order to
pinpoint the best one - most likely requiring me to repeat the cd
install process all over again. :-(

The best top speed in the Linux/ openBSD line of OSes was with the
ClarkConnect server, but this had a habit of unaccountably slowing right
down to less than 4MB/s during small or large data backups. It was a bit
of a lottery as to whether a 450MB file would go at 22MB/s or crawl
along at 4MB/s which was the reason why I ditched it in favour of
FreeNAS which only topped out at some 19 to 20 MB/s (but it was a
consistent performance, until these latest two updates).

Now, I'm wondering if the ClarkConnect server software has eliminated
the inconsistency bug and is now worth reconsidering (but only if it can
boot off the card reader- trying to manipulate partition space is a bit
of a pain I'd prefer to avoid).

I can't believe I'm the only FreeNAS user experiencing the problems I'm
now having, but looking in the FreeNAS forum doesn't show anyone else
asking about the problems I've experienced and, therefore, no hints to
follow up on. I do so hope someone here can offer a bit of help over
this. :-)

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

.

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