Hey, I don’t know anything about computers! Just kidding, but when it comes to “PC hardware” it sometimes feels like it. We got past the previous setbacks and progress is being made. One thing I forgot to mention in the last post is that I could not get all six drives to mount. I thought it was a bad SATA cable so I ordered three more.
About those SATA cables… The computer had four, I ordered three more, and I had that crappy one that destroyed the SSD which I could not use, so I thought there was a bad one but it turned out there was not! No matter, I needed the right angle ones anyway. (So now I have 6 brand new ones along with the four that came with the computer. Good to have spares I guess.)
So what happened was that I did not realized the computer actually had 10 SATA ports! Yeah, not 6, but 10. Though there only seems to be power supply connections for 6 drives, so… But here’s the thing, two of them do not seem to work. So while I thought I had a bad SATA cable, or a misbehaving drive, two of the ports do not work. (The two bottom white ones.) I switched to the two block ones slight above the white ones and all six drives showed up!
Now there only seem to be six power connectors so six drives connected make sense, but there might be a way to use more of them. Also, I’ve read that the ones that do not work might be disabled in the BIOS, so that’s something to look into. Oh, I guess the SATA ports are a variety of different speeds as well? So I also need to figure that out to use the faster ones…
But hey, I’ve got six drives mounted and used by TrueNAS right now. The front (external?) bay is still a mess, but I’ll work on building something there to hold the drives now that everything actually works. (Well, more or less.)
Huzzah! Six drives. And yes, I did replace the SSD that got destroyed. Ended up with a 128GB since that is still plenty for the TrueNAS system to live on. I’ve got another post coming to talk about using TrueNAS and how it’s going on the software front.