[SATLUG] Re: Linux-based home NAS

[Sean Carolan]

> This general subject of a home NAS, etc. is fascinating to me, and I've
> been following it from the beginning, but I don't think I've seen an
> answer to the question: Why do you think you need something faster than
> your nslu2? By "faster" do you mean a faster CPU (in which case why?),
> or faster I/O busses,
> or maybe you have other applications you'd like to run on this which
> will require more CPU power than the slug has? I'm curious how you
> arrived at the
> conclusion that you needed a faster machine, and what "faster" means in
> this case.

The slowness comes when you are doing one of the following:

*  Moving very large files.  The best speed I can expect is about
1.1Mb/s.  Not bad, but certainly nowhere near what my 54Mb/s wlan is
capable of.  The bottleneck could be the CPU and/or memory.

*  rsync.  Since rsync uses md5 sums to check file sizes, it can be
very taxing on the CPU.  Furthermore, the 32mb is not enough space to
store the checksum data for all the files, so you are dipping into
swap and slowing down the file transfer process by an order of
magnitude.

In sum, I need a device that will allow me to transfer multiple
gigabytes of data within a timespan measured in hours, not days.

The nslu2 has only 32Mb of RAM, and it does an incredible job of
managing that small amount of memory.   Kudos to the folks who
maintain and troubleshoot the kernel for this device, because they've
done a bangup job.  The slug never crashes, and it serves SMB files
like a champ.  slug makes a fantastic itunes or media server, if you
want something quiet and small for serving movies to your MythTV or
Xbox Media Center.  But don't expect to be streaming anything that
requires more than about 1.5Mb/s transfer rates.  Jeremy can also
attest to the network speeds that are possible with a slug.