Tag: nas

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HP Z420 Setbacks…

I found some 3D models for hard drive caddies and one was not great and the second was not great but okay so I tweaked it a bit. Still not perfect, but good enough for now.

I was able to get the three large hard drives in place and connected. Not bad.

I put the smaller drives into the large front-accessible bay and things looked pretty good…

I figured I would deal with the large front-accessible bay next, eventually building something to properly hold the drives…

And then I noticed the top piece had two little caddies for small drives so I put the boot SSD in there along with another drive.

That’s when the bad happened.

I had this straight (not right angle) SATA cable in my cable bin and maybe it was too stiff, or maybe I pulled to hard on something, but whatever, the SSD I got less than two months ago had the plastic connector housing torn off, and stuck inside the cable end.

I tried to reinsert things and reconnect, but after a half dozen attempts it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to boot.

I’m a bit bummed about the destruction of a brand new SSD. (It was only $20 but hey, $20 is $20.) I have a super-cheap SSD I pulled from the dead OptiPlex that I’ll use for a replacement until I get a new one. (I looked up the brand for the super-cheap SSD and all I could find was comments saying it’s garbage hardware to avoid.)

Anyway, this is just a minor setback, and a small increase in the price of this build. I think we’ll still be pretty close to my original estimate for three 4TB drives in this TrueNAS box for under $180 USD.

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HP Z420 Workstation

Even though I’ve posted about NAS devices as far back as 2005 I’ve never really run one at home until recently. I got OpenMediaVault running and it worked well, so when I was offered a free computer that could fit at least 6 drives I figured what the heck!? Let’s try the open source version of TrueNAS Scale.

Oh, I should point out that in 2007 I said “FreeNAS it looks like a cool solution, and something I may try to play with in the future” and hey, the future is now!? And honestly I still deal with some of the questions I asked back in 2007.

I should note a few things. First, the Z420 is a bit of a power hog but keep in mind I got it for free. So any extra energy cost can be traded for the fact this was zero-cost hardware, right? I don’t know if I will run this long-term but for now I can use it to learn TrueNAS.

The other thing is, you can easily just buy a Synology NAS and stuff it with drives. I say “easily” because they do a good job of building a ready-to-use NAS solution for most people… if you’ve got the budget. I like doing things on the cheap and learning the hard way though. You’re welcome!

Anyway, this post will focus on the HP Z420 Workstation. I’m sure I will post more about TrueNAS, but the installation was pretty simple. I flashed the ISO to a thumb drive, dropped a 256GB SSD into the case, booted it up, and ran the installer. Oh, I did remove one of the sticks of RAM because it showed an error (on the monitor) when I originally booted it. There is now just 12GB of RAM. I may try to re-install the DIMM or maybe get more RAM. 12GB might be plenty for testing though. (I tried to reinstall the fourth DIMM and it didn’t boot. I may give up on the fourth DIMM.)

I got the case open to see what I was working with… I should note I am not a person who has ever “built a PC” though I’ve opened a lot of machines. Tons and tons of Macs, from desktops to laptops and models in-between. I’ve also opened lots of Windows laptops which eventually became Linux laptops. Still as far as “towers” go my experience is with Apple hardware.

I had to procure three more SATA cables and added them to the one I found in a drawer and the two that were in the machine, but I got six drives connected. I popped out the optical drive and multi-card reader thing. Even though there is spaces for six drives I don’t have them in place yet… but they are all plugged in and… hanging about. It works.

I threw a monitor on for the install but it’s still attached for now as I get things up and running. Like other NAS products you pretty much do everything through a browser so no monitor is expected or needed. (Once your hardware actually works.)

I’ll need to 3D print some hard drive sleds (sled? caddy? whatever) and then get the drives more permanently mounted. These are mostly junk drives, old and smallish… I do have two 4TB drives ready to go and may have a third one soon. You really want a minimum of three drives for ZFS and more than that is even better. Again, I am trying to be economical in this project and not just spend a ton of money. If I wanted to do that I’d just buy a Synology box and call it a day.

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TrueNAS Testing

TrueNAS Dashboard

After my experiments with OpenMediaVault (and success) I decided to try out TrueNAS Scale. The first thing I noticed about TrueNAS is that it’s legit, and by that I mean it’s described as “Open Enterprise Storage” and on the web site it says “Award-Winning Storage Trusted by Over 60% of the Fortune 500” and lists a bunch of huge corporations. Sounds legit. We’re using the Community Edition which is to say it’s the open source version with no paid support contract or whatever…

Now, besides all of that I just wanted to try it out because I had heard good things, especially about the ZFS file system, which is more advanced than RAID. I had another old Dell Optiplex laying around from a failed client project years ago but it would not boot so I was in no rush with this TrueNAS testing. Then out of nowhere my sister messaged me with a photo of an HP Z420 Workstation and said “How do I get rid of this?” and I said “I’ll take it!” So I did.

The HP Z420 Workstation is a beast of a box with space for six drives so it seemed like a good candidate for TrueNAS… so that’s what I did. (I’ll write up a separate post about the Z420 and just focus on TrueNAS for this post.)

Because I’ve already got a fully functional NAS running this one was for testing, trying, and learning.

It took some clicking around and minimal doc reading to get a pool setup, and eventually an SMB share I could store files on. I also installed some containerized applications. And then I pulled out the three drives and swapped in two other drives and set those up. Then I added back in the original drives but just two instead of three. At this point I wanted to just test things out and see what would happen. I saw warnings about degraded pools and such. Nice to see. I haven’t quite figured out exporting a pool and re-importing again, which is what I think I might need to do someday.

In my mind the nice thing about OpenMediaVault just using an ext4 drive is that if the system dies I can just plug that drive into another computer and access all the data. (It’ll need to be a computer running Linux, but that’s okay.)

For these TrueNAS drives with ZFS it doesn’t seem to be that simple. I know you can run ZFS on Linux and I’ve even found a version for macOS but I think I basically need to learn all about ZFS before I feel confident I can rescue my data if things go wrong.

The obvious solution seems to be running two (or more) TrueNAS servers so one backs up to another, and you’ve got a second one to move drives to in case the first one fails.

I’m sure there are answers to all of this… if you have them, or other suggestions, feel free to share! Otherwise just consider this my notebook where I write things down for future me.

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OpenMediaVault Update

About a month ago I got OpenMediaVault up and running on a Raspberry Pi. It worked until the disk failed so I ended up redoing it all with a real computer and a better disk. I also added a backup disk and have an rsync job running daily to do a backup.

There’s also a computer off-site that does a daily backup to the NAS via rsync over ssh. Next on the list is to do the same with a web server I’ve got running at a hosting provider.

This post is really just a check-in to say it’s been working really well. I do like OpenMediaVault for a very simple NAS solution…

That said, I’m digging into TrueNAS Scale now and it’s… a lot. Which is fine. It’s been fun comparing the two, and I’ll have a post coming to cover TrueNAS soon.

Oh, and I’m considering building a small simple NAS using OpenMediaVault to go off-site for a bit more redundancy with the backups. Stay Tuned!

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OpenMediaVault NAS

I’ve been meaning to play around with setting up NAS (Network Attached Storage) device for a while now, and I’ve got a lot of old Raspberry Pi computers around so… I got openmediavault running on a Raspberry Pi and connected an old USB hard drive to it. It worked pretty well! I was mostly testing things and didn’t really have this plan to move all of my files to it, which is good because I killed it. I mean, it died. The hard drive, not the Pi.

I had to connect the drive to the Pi using a USB hub so the drive would get enough power. I honestly grabbed some old random hard drive enclosure not realizing at the time the drive inside was at least a decade old. A friend of mine gave me a pile of drives a few years back that were retired from a recording studio. Anyway, the drive died, I got some good lessons in drive repair on Linux, and I moved on.

While the Raspberry Pi seemed to do quite well running openmediavault I also had an old Dell OptiPlex lying around so I decided to use a “real” computer so I could explore things like running containers and more heavy load stuff on the NAS.

Overall I’ve been mostly pleased with things. It’s been quite an improvement since I last ran a NAS on an NSLU2 long, long, ago.

Right now I’ve got a recent SSD drive that is not total garbage as the primary drive, and another old “junk” drive as a backup drive. I used the openmediavault rsync tasks feature to setup a nightly backup to the junk drive. I am sure that junk drive will die at some point but I’ve got a lead on some larger replacement drives from a friend. (Also on the cheap, because that’s obviously how I roll things.)

I’ve got a friend who is a huge fan of Synology and I do admit their stuff is really nice, especially the management interface. If I had unlimited funds I’d probably run out and buy a Synology device (or two) and call it a day… But then again there is a certain appeal to rolling your own solution and learning a lot in the process.