is my nas under powered?

[Deleted member 82943]

I've got a dlink nas DNS-320 and if I start a bunch of transfers and writes to it the system gets bogged down. This mostly occurs with torrents - starting a bunch of torrents to download to the nas on one box and if a roomate does starts downloads on his box writing to a different folder one of the clients locks up. Also I notice tangible slowdowns on the htpc that is pulling a movie from the nas and throwing it up on my projector screen. the htpc is a 2100T 4GB of ram box all connected to a netgear gigabit switch. the nas is on the same switch too. the nas has two 1TB drives but i am not sure what speeds... that could be a problem.

My potential solution if the problem is the processing hardware found in the NAS and not the possible slowness of the drives is to, if the data wont get lost, put the drives into my htpc which stays on all the time anyway and leverage teh additional power of the desktop class cpu and intel chipset for the drives -- but if it's the drives i'm probably screwed.

could I just add the drives to the htpc in a jbod setup and not lose data?

 

[Deleted member 82943]

bueller?

 

[Dangman]

It's more than likely the NAS itself. It's a $100 NAS so the performance is gonna be fairly slow when heavily used regardless of what drives you're using. Torrents are disk intensive. Combined that with a slow NAS and you're gonna see the performance slow-downs you noted in your OP.

could I just add the drives to the htpc in a jbod setup and not lose data?

The drives in the DNS-320 are formatted as ext3. So out of the box, no it won't work with your HTPC if your HTPC is using Windows. There are ways to use/see a ext3 formatted drive in Windows but I haven't tried any of them so can't say which one is gonna be your best bet. Google 'ext3 windows" and try out the options.

 

[Deleted member 82943]

Oh yes thanks for the tip about ext3 I'll put the data on external drives for the transfer

I'm going to try this out http://www.ext2fsd.com/?page_id=16

What about jbod do I have to set them up on the controller as jbod or what?

 

[Dangman]

What about jbod do I have to set them up on the controller as jbod or what?

Depends on what JBOD you're talking about. If you're taking about the JBOD where multiple drives are presented as a single drive, you will lose your data as the drives have to be reformatted. Not to mention the lower performance and stability IIRC. If you're talking about the literal JBOD, a bunch of drives that shows up individually, you don't have to do anything besides configuring the HTPC to be able to read and write ext3 partitions.

And I hope you have a backup of any critical data just in case those ext3 options screws up your drives.

 

[Deleted member 82943]

yeah the nas shows the drives as one big almost 2TB drive...alas a backup and reformat will have to be my only solution

i think i'll just throw win7 64 on it and throw the drives in after backing up the data, thanks for the advice

 

[Dangman]

yeah the nas shows the drives as one big almost 2TB drive...alas a backup and reformat will have to be my only solution

It could also be a RAID 0 array. Either way, yeah you're gonna have to backup and reformat those drives if you want to use them in your HTPC.

i think i'll just throw win7 64 on it and throw the drives in after backing up the data, thanks for the advice

No prob.

 

[patrickdk]

Torrents themselfs are a huge pain for any system. They do tons of random i/o to the disks.
Personally, I would limit torrents to a single drive, and let it beat the crap out of that disk, and not affect everything else, or make a large enough raid system that can take the abuse.

 

[Deleted member 82943]

would a raid-0 setup with even 5400rpm drives be worth it for all that random i/o that the torrents do?

 

[Dangman]

would a raid-0 setup with even 5400rpm drives be worth it for all that random i/o that the torrents do?

Not really unless you're running 20+ torrents. Or are downloading the torrents onto the same drive as your OS. Just downloading the torrent onto a separate drive like patrickdk noted.

 

[Deleted member 82943]

well i generally do about 10 or so torrents but the raid-0 drives would be independant from the htpc in that they would be just for storage the os is on an agility 90GB

 

[Red Falcon]

The drives in the DNS-320 are formatted as ext3. So out of the box, no it won't work with your HTPC if your HTPC is using Windows. There are ways to use/see a ext3 formatted drive in Windows but I haven't tried any of them so can't say which one is gonna be your best bet. Google 'ext3 windows" and try out the options.

Well, since it's a NAS, it would work with Ext3, or any other file system for that matter since it is using SMB/CIFS.
However, if it is used through USB or eSATA, then definitely, you are correct.

Most NASes use ethernet and thus would use one of the above protocols to transfer the data.
I do this with my Linux server which runs XFS/Ext4 and can run SMB on Windows systems with ease.

 

[Deleted member 82943]

yeah the nas is underpowered though so i am going to combine the htpc which i use mostly for movies and light gaming and stream the movies from the nas instead i'll just put the drives into the htpc and leverage the power of the beefier box

 

[diizzy]

The DNS-320 is a kirkwood based device with a 800Mhz CPU and 128Mb RAM, it will work fine for a small home network for serving files but my own testing shows that anything else with most likely "overload" it. It should be able to serve about 15-20Mbyte/s over Samba (SMB) but that's about it. I have a similar device and while I haven't tried running torrents on it I would guess that it would be a bit more sluggish.
//Danne