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regular / pending-projects

thoughts on mostly silly and useless present and future endeavours
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Replace QNAP NAS with Dell file server #3

Open regular opened 7 years ago

regular commented 7 years ago

I've got a Dell PE48401 server that is unused for five years or something. It has a lot of RAM though and will perform much better than the underpowered QNAP NAS. (zfs needs a lot of RAM).

I bought 2 4x hot swap 2,5" HD mounting things from Pollin. The quality isn't great (all plastic) especially when compared to the QNAP. It would be nice to upgrade the QNAP's mainboard at some point. However, I have no idea what the form factor is.

Storage

Currently there are 8 HDs in the QNAP that need to be migrated. The Dell has 4x SATA on board and it would be nice to have an extra SATA port for a boot drive. I have a spare PATA flash drive that I could probably use for that purpose too though. (it came with the QNAP, I replaced t with a bigger one)

Next Steps

Questions;

Slots

2x PCI Express slots (1x8 lane and 1x1 lane) 2x PCI-X slots (64-bit/133MHz, 3.3v) 1x PCI slot (32-bit/33MHz)

regular commented 7 years ago

Ordered

regular commented 7 years ago

Ok, sent back that stuff because it is useless. The Card does not support JBOD, mit hardware raid only (you don't want that, because the on-disk format is proprietary).

regular commented 7 years ago

Bought a new fan for the QNAP (the fan ws getting very noisy) FD129225LB DC12V 0.15A 9225 92mm. I also bought a PCI riser cable thing. Maybe I can use the nice drive enclose and 8 port SATA adapter on a different computer?

regular commented 7 years ago

The thing I ended up buying for the DELL: Syba PCI-Express (PCIe) 2.0 Controller SATA III (8 Port). Installing it was not an issue. I installed Arch on a separate SATA drive (connected to the motherboard). And installed zfs from AUR. Problem was: zpool import -d /dev/disks/by-id found the pool, but showed all drives being offline. Turns out that they've been part of a Linux software RAID at some point in the past and the kernel found the RAID superblocks and re0created that mdm raid, leaving the drives unavailable to zfs. Removing the mdm superblocks fixed the problem.

regular commented 7 years ago

Next steps

regular commented 7 years ago

The zfs raid is running fine on the Dell. However I'd now prefer btrfs because of its implementation int the kernel. zfs causes issues when the kernel is updated, because its dependency on kernel headers. btrfs's RAID5 support is not ready though, so the best thing to do right now seems to wait for it to become stable.

New plan: