Octavean

If the HDDs in in question are not rated for use in a NAS or Server system with more then 8 HDDs is it safe to go up to 12 Drives?

I've seen something similar. In my case I have three Rosewill RSV-SATA-Cage-34 hot swap bays which support 4 HDD each. They are natively configured as 1 through 4 but I wanted to set them up as 1 through 12 (rather then 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4) which took some doing to arrange correctly. I tested the configuration by swapping in and out a 2TB HDD which worked as expected with respect to drive number detection and physical position. However, one time, far removed and unrelated to the earlier test, I swapped in a HDD and it wasn't numbered correctly. Tried it again in another slot and it was more of the same. After a reboot it all went back to functioning correctly.

That's what I thought since I recall reading it somewhere. However, I created a SHR volume consisting of: 3x3TB WD Red HDDs I also had 1x2TB WD Red HDD uninitiated (which I have since removed) Crucial 128GB SSD I initially installed on the Crucial 128GB SSD because it was the only drive in the system. I didn't even think I was going to be able to get it to work but the install / setup was surprisingly easy. Eventually I didn't see the need for the Crucial SSD because I figured the DSM was replicated on the other drives. So I shut down and pulled the Crucial SSD but after restarting it I couldn't find the NAS on the network. I waited a while then shut it down and reconnected the Crucial SSD. It booted after that but Storage Manager cited the following error: "System is healthy. Failed to access the system partition. Please repair it by clicking the following link. (repair)" I didn't do the repair (yet) and started to think I was wrong and that the system was dependent on the Crucial SSD to boot. Maybe I should have just waited it out longer and it would have eventually showed up on the network? Either way the NAS clearly didn't like the removal of the Crucial SSD. Usually it boots fairly quickly and without issue. Full specs are as follows: Intel G3258 (Dual Core 3.2GHz Haswell LGA1150 Pentium) Asus Z97-E motherboard (6 SATA ports total with 2 from the SATA Express port) 8GB DDR3 IO Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 ControllerSI-PEX40064 (Marvell 88SE9215) DSM: XPEnoBoot 5.2-5592.2 / DS3615xs build 5592.2,.... (I think). Thanks for any input you might have,....

I was simply wondering if it would be possible to install the DSM to an M.2 SSD as a boot drive? This way a SATA port is freed up for a RAID array / storage volume. I'm assuming its bad practice to have the drive that the system partition is on as part of a SHR / RAID array.