joel_ezekiel

Hi Guys, I've flashed the h710p mini in my server, I have an LACP connection to my two Ciscos, everything is ready to go, however, one of my brand new disks are DoA, super super frustrating. Anyway, what's more frustrating is the LED lights on the hot swap caddy's don't work when you flash the RAID card, which makes me wonder if it might be better just running single volumes per disk. I've come from a time where I ran 2 ZFS RAID-Z2 arrays totalling 14 disks, starting on OpenSolaris, moving to CentOS, managing it all via CLI, creating my own startup scrips for docker, all that really annoying stuff. And I have realised, a) I don't need performance to store a bunch of really large video files, I'm not editing them and b) I would rather spend my time riding motorcycles than looking after this thing! I build server racks for a job, so the goal is to build this thing to be rock solid, run for as long as it can, and never look back, possibly upgrading to an R540 in a few years. And keep this as simple as possible, upgradable with more storage, I have 5 12Tb Seagate NAS disks to start with (one of them doesn't fire up.. yay). So my question/concerns are... Am I right to assume that, if I run UnRAID with JBOD, in the event of a failure (and the parity also fails), I will only lose what is on that failed disk, and any other computer, with any other SAS/SATA controller can read those disks? And... if I went down the route of leaving the Dell firmware on the RAID card, and setting up 1 volume per disk, I would need to replace the RAID card with another of the same to read the disk configuration, in order to be able to rescue data from the failed array? If what I think is true, it's most likely safer to just go with the card flashed over to LSI. Appreciate your feedback!

Howdy all, I'm finally, after about 10 years, going to replace my zfs storage and docker server... But I'm cheap, I have an Antec 1200 with 4x Lian Li 4in3 HDD bays full, an old Intel Xeon Sandybridge CPU/Mobo HBA SAS etc. etc. all the fans are dead (except for the HDD bays), but I've only ever had to replace the PSU and she's good. My plan is to just copy everything off onto some cheap external disks which will be shucked and re-used as a mirrored storage target for the families time machine or windows backups, re-build the server physically (the Antec 1200 case supports a lot of disks), clean it up, replace all the fans (except maybe the top one cannot be replaced?), rip out the old multiple failed Seagate Barracuda 3tb disks that had massive failure rates (maybe beat them with a hammer to make me feel better), re-use the 4tb Seagate NAS disks and put in new larger 2x8tb NAS disks for parity, or possibly purchase two 12+tb disks for parity. So I'm just after other peoples thoughts on my concerns below: If the CPU/MOBO gets replaced later, will unRAID have any issues with this? will the storage crap out and not be recognized as it may be on new controllers? if its using GUIDs this shouldn't matter. Is it easy to upgrade the the size of the parity disks or do I need to just start big? Is there any problem running a second mirrored array with two large shucked disk as a backup target? OR! Am I completely insane and should I just build a complete new server? I require the system to have an "out of band" remote management, as the hardware will be stored up high with no easy physical access, this is my biggest issue with replacing everything now at once. Do I hold out until we replace our hardware at work, and take the Dell r720XD home? Could be 6 months, and then I'm running old loud equipment anyway? Stop making my life difficult, buy a NAS ready made (while costly and limited it keeps nagging around in the back of my head!) Finally, I've not looked into this, but what about an unRAID server with direct attached storage, is this a thing? Anyway, thanks in advance for any suggestions, criticism, etc. P.S. I'm open to a new NORCO style case with hot swap bays, if someone can point out the best place to get one in Australia!