tcs2tx

I have no issues with 2 SSDs in my G8 - 1 on SATA port on MB, and 1 connected on HighPoint minisas.

I edited the original post to include a number of pictures. Note - this is my first time posting images, so let me know (and advise) if they are not visible.

The second picture above shows the door open on the HP with the 4 drive trays shown.

Thanks. I like it a lot. I've gone through numerous cases, motherboards and controller cards before arriving at this setup. I hope my numerous trials help someone else. I will also revise the original post to add that the hard drives enumerate the same as their respective slots - HP (drives 1-5) and the external case (drives 6-13). Note - For the HP, the four hard drives are hot-swap with the SSD being internal.

I posted my setup in the hardware thread, but am posting as its own thread for those people who are considering different build configurations. I have run XPEnology on a number of different setups (ESXi and bare metal). This is my current setup with 12 hot swap disks: HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 - enumerated drives 1-6 - drives 1-4 - 4 hot swap bays - drive 5 - SSD for cache using optical drive connectors and space - drive 6 - empty and I believe unusable (only 5 connectors on motherboard) - CPU upgraded to Xeon E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz - 16 GB ECC RAM (2 x 8 GB 1333 MHz @ 1.5 V) - HighPoint Rocket 2722 External 8-Port PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SAS/SATA 6Gb/s Non-RAID Controller - Integrated Remote Console (same as IPMI on Supermicro) - Link aggregation using 2x Gigabit Sans Digital ST-SAN-TR8X+ Digital TowerRAID - 8 hot swap bays (enumerated drives 7-14) - connected to HighPoint Card using 2x Mini SAS 26-Pin SFF-8088 Male to Mini SAS 26-Pin SFF-8088 Cables Summary - 12 hot swap bays (with drive numbering matching slots), SSD cache, small, quiet, powerful, remote access and link aggregation. Synology DS1815+ and Backup XPEnology (HP Gen8 Microserver and ST-SAN-TR8X+) Doors Open showing 4 bays of HP and 8 bays of ST-SAN-TR8X+ Top view inside HP with SSD connected in optical drive bay Left view inside HP showing (1) USB key in MB slot, (2) red SATA cable in MB running up to SSD in optical drive bay, (3) HighPoint controller, and (4) SFF-8088 cables connecting to HighPoint controller Right view inside HP showing 2x 8GB ECC RAM Back view of HP showing (1) SFF-8088 cables, (2) dual GB lan in link aggregation, and (3) IPMI (aka HP iLO) Back view of ST-SAN-TR8X+ showing SFF-8088 cables

I have run XPEnology on a number of different setups (ESXi and bare metal). This is my current setup with 12 how swap disks: HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 - 4 hot swap bays - 1 SSD for cache using optical drive connectors and space - CPU upgraded to Xeon(E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz - 16 GB ECC RAM (2 x 8 GB 1333 MHz @ 1.5 V) - HighPoint Rocket 2722 External 8-Port PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SAS/SATA 6Gb/s Non-RAID Controller - Integrated Remote Console (same as IPMI on Supermicro) Sans Digital ST-SAN-TR8X+ Digital TowerRAID - 8 hot swap bays - connected to HighPoint Card using 2x Mini SAS 26-Pin SFF-8088 Male to Mini SAS 26-Pin SFF-8088 Cables Summary - 12 hot swap bays, small, quiet, powerful and remote access.

ESXi does not allow creation of a datastore on the USB. For this reason, it is good to use a minimal size USB since you are not going to be able to use the rest of the space on the drive. I do recall sometimes having errors when trying to create a datastore on a SATA drive in ESXi 5.5 that had previously been used in another operating system. I do not recall the specific errors that I sometimes get, but in case it helps you I was able to get around the problem using one of the following methods: 1) Within ESXi, once again select the disk for creation of a datastore. There are at least two options for formatting (I do not recall the specifics) with one being "newer" and the other being "older" (e.g., v4 vs. v5, or something similar). I was getting an error message when I select the newer version. If I instead select the older version, the drive is able to be formatted and a datastore created. I do not know the practical difference of the older vs. the newer version, but I converted to the newer version by deleting the datastore/disk, and once again going through creation but this time selecting the newer version and proceeding to finish without an error. 2) Put the drive in a Windows machine and from the command prompt, run DISKPART, select the disk and run CLEAN

I was able to get this to work by (1) sharing my content form my server (FreeNAS) using NFS (2) mounting the share from the command line in XPEnology

I was able to get this to work by (1) sharing my content form my server (FreeNAS) using NFS (2) mounting the share from the command line in XPEnology

OK, I'm coming back asking questions after a couple of time (one 6 months and just recently) trying to figure out how to install ZFSonLinux. There are a number of different methods of installing ZFSonLinux depending on the flavor of Linux. As I look at the choices, it's not clear to me which one(s) are the correct choice for XPEnology. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Holy crap, Batman! That would be awesome. I took a look at the site and it looks like it will take someone with many more skills than I possess in order to figure out how to get it installed on XPEnology, but if someone does, I will be the first to try it out!

I have enough memory (AFAIK, 1 GB of RAM recommended for each TB of ZFS storage + 1 more GB of RAM) and the RAM is also ECC. Aside from all the bells and whistles, one thing that I love about ZFS is the ability to move my pools of storage from OS to another without having to copy terabytes of data from one file system to another. I've been able to move my pools from BSD to ZFSGuru to FreeNAS to OpenIndiana in just a few minutes. And, I agree that the Synology interface is that best that I've seen. The only downside that I see is the file system. I would love to move everything, but the underlying filesystem, to Synology.

A post on another site led me to the XPEnology site and from here to sources for installing in ESXi. All in all, very cool. I am currently running an OpenIndiana-based NAS (with a napp-it front end) in ESXi in order to take advantage of the ZFS file system. The one, and only, limitation I see for the Synology is the lack of the ZFS file system. As I was playing with Synology, it allows me to mount my CIFS shares from the OpenIndiana NAS. Surprisingly, to me at least, the mounted shares can be accessed on my network as if they are physically attached to the Synology. So, what are the downsides (other than complexity, perhaps) of running Synology as a "front end" for a ZFS-based backend?