Tag: computers

The TrueNAS build is still going on! Last time we talked about Drive Caddies but that was weeks ago. Blame work being busy and some travel mixed in, anyway… I thought I could only add six drives to the Z420 because there were 6 SATA power cables… of course there were more than 6 SATA data ports! (Yes, there are five 2.5″ drives in the photo above.)

The optical drive power cable was one of the old 4 pin jobbers, but guess what? They make 4 Pin Male IDE Molex to 15 Pin Female Dual SATA Adapter/Splitters. So I got one. Well, two actually because it’s a two-pack.

So yeah, now I have 7 SATA drives plugged in, and can actually add one more. There are two pools, each with three disks, and then the boot drive, and I will see about adding a second SSD to mirror the boot drive. Yeah, 8 drives… who would have thought such things were possible! This is the free computer that just keeps on giving!

I will have to rethink the strategy of fitting all the drives into the front bay though. Luckily they are all 2.5″ so it may just be a matter of using some of those two-high 3D printed drive caddies I found.

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When I got the HP Z420 Workstation it had 4 sticks of RAM for a total of 16GB, except it got an error booting up and removing one stick seemed to fix it, though being down to 12GB seemed a little low since I plan to run a number of applications via containers. I took a gamble and ordered more RAM. I got these A-Tech 8GB PC3-12800E ECC sticks from eBay for $20.

As I’ve previously mentioned I’ve never built a PC, and my experience working on computers is (mostly) in the Apple world. I learned about ECC (Error Correction Circuitry) RAM and I did some reading on A-Tech. Consensus seemed to be that A-Tech RAM is cheap because they are most likely rebranded sticks from well-known brand name RAM manufacturers that may have failed one of their quality control tests. Eh, I figured I’d give it a try.

I added the two 8GB sticks in, and actually put all the RAM in the slots in the order specified for the machine. Things ran okay for a day but when using the system through the web interface it locked up… I had to hard reboot it, something I haven’t had to do at all since I got it running. I figured maybe the new RAM was the issue but the RAM testing stuff I looked up was for Windows… I didn’t know how to do the test with TrueNAS, which isn’t very supportive of just installing random command line stuff.

Folks recommended MemTest86+ which boots right into the testing application. Nice!

The MemTest86+ ISO was tiny, under 7MB! It flashed to a thumb drive almost instantly and I booted up to the testing. I had pulled out all the ram except the two new 8GB sticks and tested for hours. It passed everything. I rebooted, ran everything again for a few hours and all tests seemed good. I then rebooted back into TrueNAS and it’s been running without issue for a day now… but I will keep doing some testing to be sure.

There is a chance that the difference between the 8GB and 4GB sticks is causing issues, so I am hesitant to add the smaller ones back in… I will probably just run with the new 16GB total for now and if needed I could always get two more and kick it up to 32GB total.

Oh! I learned one more thing about TrueNAS. I guess it will use most of the “free” RAM for the ZFS cache but that will drop down as applications need the RAM. This is much different from my OpenMediaVault NAS which has 16GB of RAM and shows 12.91GB of free RAM…

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.