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If you want a NAS that takes just a few minutes to get running and will run quietly for years without requiring further thought, get a Synology. If that's you, but you are severely budget constrained, consider buying a used 12 or 13 series Synology on eBay - just wait for a decent deal. On the other hand, if you like to tinker, then building your own Xpenology is quite fun, and you can get more power per dollar spent... if you don't include the cost of your time. I ended up doing both. I have a Synology DS1813+ and I have an Xpenology that I tinker with.

I have a twelve-drive Xpenology box that use to perform periodic backups of my Synology DS1813+ I boot it up when needed, and then shut it down after the backups have completed. It has been flawless so far, except the known issue that iSCSI does not work.

That looks very useful. I use Synology DHCP, so I'll have to wait until that incompatibility has been worked out.

I get the same message every minute or so on an HP DL180G6. It's a dual slot motherboard, but I'm running only a single CPU with four cores. It appears to cause no problems, but it is annoying.

Check out the Silverstone DS380 at http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=452&area It's a fairly small black cube that supports eight 3.5" drives plus four 2.5" drives - perfect for Xpenology. Further discussion here: http://forums.servethehome.com/chassis- ... #post26689 with talk of pairing it with an 8-core low power Avoton board that has 12 motherboard SATA ports.

Much thanks Stanza. I will edit my defaults since I prefer fast rebuilds and am willing to give up some responsiveness while it happens. Oddly, what you say is true. echo 100000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max works while echo 100000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min does not. Two related parameters. but only one is settable via that method.

I can add driver for this in next repack. This is handle by hpsa driver which is included. What's happend exactly (no disk, can't install, failed reboot ?) Install DSM, when all ok, put the P410 controller with one disk to see if dsm can find it. This is intesresting. I think default values are low to not degrade performance during volume expand. That's fantastic Trantor. Thank you! I'll anxiously await the next repack. By the way, those Brocade 1020 cards are now around $35 on eBay, so when the driver is ready, anyone who wants SFP+, active cable only 10GbE can dive in very inexpensively. As for the P410, the single 9TB drive that I had configured just didn't appear to be immediately recognized - perhaps because it was >4TB. LSI cards are more familiar to me, so I just removed the HP card and went LSI SAS2008 instead. If I build up another HP-based Xpenology, which I may do to try HA, I'll try the HP card again. Lastly, when I expanded the array a second time to 12 disks, I saw ~450MB/s of disk activity, which made for a very speedy RAID6 (actually SHR with two disk redundancy) rebuild. I was copying files at the same time, over a single gigabit link at the time, and did not see any slowdown. Xpenology on server-grade hardware is amazingly fast compared to my original DS213j - which is stating the obvious perhaps, but still a welcome discovery for me. Volume scrubs run at ~840MB/s.

Stanza, I'm sorry if you have been offended in any way. My goal was to outline what I did to get one specific server - the HP DL180 G6 - working with Xpenology. Mostly that consisted of reading what everyone else has done to get Xpenology working on various other hardware, including you, and figuring out which specific bits to apply to the HP DL. In each case, I included the URL to the original source material, and that includes your excellent discovery of the voodoo port config. For example, I said "I was able to fix this with the instructions at " and never claimed to have invented any of it. I also posted with the same attributions on servethehome.com, where I am a member and moderator, a site with a long history of discussing DIY servers, and a place where the DL180 G6 is quite popular and has been discussed at length.

stanza, Thank you very much for posting this. With your findings, I was able to make Xpenology see all 13 drives in my HP DL180 G6. What worked for me was to set the values to: esataportcfg=”0x0000000” (I also disabled eSATA on a separate config line) usbportcfg="0xff00000" internalportcfg=”0xfffff” Note that I do not have 20 internal ports. It seems that you just need to set the value to be equal to or higher than the number of ports you actually have. I don't yet know if my settings will survive a reboot. Right now I'm expanding a volume with the now-visible disks, after which I'll reboot and see what happens.

Thanks to everyone who worked to create Xpenology. I just started using it, and I like it very much. I have a Synology DS1813+, and wanted a low cost way to back it up regularly, and a way to get 10GbE on a budget. My solution: an HP DL180 G6 with Xpenology. If you haven't seen the DL180 G6, you should take a look. It's a 2U rack mount server with 4, 8, 12, or 14 3.5" disk bays or 25 2.5" disk bays - perfect for a larger NAS. The best part, however is the price. They are regularly available for $175 barebones (http://www.ebay.com/itm/130959380215?_t ... EBIDX%3AIT). Add a $35 Xeon L5520 CPU, two $10 sticks of 4GB RAM, and a $75 used LSI SAS2008 HBA (e.g. http://www.ebay.com/itm/261368902333) and you have yourself the equivalent of a $3K Rackstation for a total of $300-$350. Equivalent in terms of horsepower, but definitely louder - you have been warned. Here is the exact configuration that I used: * DL180 G6 12-bay w/ expander (there are 4,8,12, 14, and 25 bay versions of the DL180 available. The 12, 14, and 25 bay versions include a SAS/SATA expander backplane) * 460W power supplies. These low-capacity supplies are the most applicable for a NAS. * 3 slot PCIe card cage - there are 1,2,3, and 4 slot versions available. * Xeon L5520 CPU * 2x4GB ECC DDR3 * LSI 9211-8i SAS HBA. My DL180 came with an HP RAID card, but it did not work with Synology. Adding support for the HP P410 would open up a very low cost way to use battery-backed RAID. * 12x Hitachi SATA drives attached to the LSI card via the SAS expander built in to this version of the DL180 * 1x SSD drive - I found that Synology would not install unless there was at least one drive attached to a motherboard SATA port. I had a small SSD hanging around, so I used that. * 8GB USB key I installed using the instructions from here: ( viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17 ) except that I used the newer boot image file from viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1361&p=9722#p9722 since it contains the LSI SAS card drivers. The install went smoothly. BTW, I used the Synology web assistant (http://find.synology.com/ instead of the fat client Assistant. Unfortunately, Xpenology saw only five of the 13 drives. I was able to fix this with the instructions at viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1361&start=230. In my case, I used these settings when editing /etc/synoinfo.conf and /etc.defaults/synoinfo.conf: esataportcfg=”0x0000000” usbportcfg="0xff00000" internalportcfg=”0xfffff” After these changes, all of the drives appear in the UI. Issues so far: 1) Had to hand-edit the above config files to see all of my disks 2) iSCSI does not work, as others have also reported. I can create a volume in the UI, but target creation fails. Volume deletion is also broken. 3) I plopped a $35 Brocade 1020 10GbE card in, but it is not recognized. I thought I saw Brocade drivers, but perhaps they are not yet available for Xpenology. 4) I see the message "wrong core: 3" in the logs quite frequently. Seems odd. 5) I was unable to use the HP P410 RAID card. That's too bad, because they are dirt cheap for a battery-backed card and would likely be a favorite of Xpenology users. 6) Volume expand speed was very slow. Changing /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min to 200000 and /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max to 600000 sped things up dramatically. Right now I'm expanding a four-disk SHR volume into a 7-disk and seeing 210-240MB/s worth of writes. 7) I have the eight-fan version of the DL180. With a single CPU, I could probably get away with two or three fans, but I can't figure out how to disable a fan without triggering an error that causes all of the other fans to spin at hyper speed. So I get by with too much cooling and too much power used - about 140 watts. 8) I wish that I could disable two of the four cores to save power, but that function is greyed out in the BIOS for some reason. Perhaps the 5500 doesn't support it.