Storage

Background Several months ago one of the Computer Recycling Project at The Working Centre’s donors donated some 2U HP server hardware. One of those machines was a nice HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 server. The server came complete with 128GB of RAM, and it had 6 x 146GB SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives. While it’s always nice to get any storage and RAM with donations, I needed a bit more storage for what I had in mind. Luckily we had an HP storage array at the back with a bunch of 300GB SAS drives I could just pull out of the array, and plug into the ProLiant DL380p Gen 8, or so I thought… ...

It lives, it dies! Our new TrueNAS server is up, and all the hardware is working, but not without some hiccups on the way. After taking a lot longer to build than expect, I was so happy the other evening when I posted about the successful Power On Self Test (POST), and the new RAM (32GB) being properly detected. Exhausted at the end of the day I left the drives disconnected and the video card out. ...

Most of the hardware is assembled The past few weeks have been extremely busy, so I knew last night would probably be the only time I would get this week to work on the NAS. I’m glad I started building the NAS last night as it took much longer than anticipated. I finally finished the build at 10pm last night (and it’s still not quite complete). Fig 1. I used an Intel Core i3-7100 CPU for lower power consumption ...

Migrating the KODI entertainment system On May 5th I mentioned that we’re Running out of space on our media center. In the comments of that post I followed up outlining a plan to buy another 8TB drive (for a total of 3 x 8TB drives) in order to do a RAID Z1 (for 16TB of space). But in order to do that I would need to reformat the drives, which means I also needed a plan to back up our media center data. I hinted at that solution in the comments too: 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID Z1 – which would give me 9TB of space (1 x 3TB is the spare), just enough to back up all the data. ...