denmalley

Hey all, I've been running xpenology for about 7 years now, at the time I had acquired a Dell t30 at a great bargain of around $300 USD and this hardware has been serving me well throughout this time. Back then, the search that lead me to xpenology was in the vein of "what software can I use with my hardware." Now I'd like to reverse the search and find hardware that best fits the software. What would this community recommend for me to find a baremetal option: In the $300-$500 USD range. No OS or HDDs needed. Willing to upgrade memory, but looking to land at 32GB, ECC compatibility preferred. Room for up to 8 HDDs preferred, but can live with 4, if there's room to squeeze in a SSD as a 5th drive. Not too noisy Even just a few second-hand model recommendations, or links to vendors/ebay sellers to keep an eye on would be most helpful. I'm also willing to build from mobo/cpu combos.

SOunds good, these are two different MACs so no problem there. Thanks for the answer.

I built two different loaders for baremetal machines using ARC and went through the standard process (i.e., I did not choose any but the suggested options). I ended up with two machines that have the same serial number. I didn't notice until I used Synology Assistant and saw them side by side. Is this normal and/or ok? I've seen this question asked back in 6.x days but just wanted to verify I won't have any issues in 7.x

As the topic states, my unit (baremetal running arpl loader, DSM 7.1.1-42962 Update 2) never responds to a reboot/shutdown request. Waited an hour, no audible disk activity, I'm just back in the interface after refreshing the screen that says "your diskstation will shut down shortly." Any tips on how to overcome this issue?

If I had to guess I think this means for example not having a storage pool with disks in bay1,2,4 while having another in bays 3,5,6. With that disk 3 of vol 2 in the middle of the sequence for vol 1

Thanks for the reply! Can you clarify this point?

I've been using xpenology for about 6 years now, started out on a Dell T30 baremetal using jun's loader (let's call it server 1). With the build starting to age, and disks reaching capacity, I thought it would be a good time to get a fresh set of disks. This old build has 2 RAID1 pairs of 8TB HDDs. Around December of last year I started to consider upgrade options. Since I had a running server, I felt the best path was to create a new build on different hardware so I'd be able to just fall back to server 1 if things went wrong. I also saw that there were now methods becoming prevalent for loading the newer 7.x software. Since I had acquired 2 14TB and 2 8TB disks I though I'd try out SHR to take advantage of the extra capacity that it affords. I dug out an old PC and used ARPL to create a new loader and used migration assistant to attain all the data from server 1. So now server 2 is running DSM 7.1.1-42962 Update 2. Server 1 has been shut down for a while. Server 2 is running fine, but has 8GB of RAM where Server 1 has 16TB ECC RAM. I'd now like to move my disks back to the Server 1 but I'm unsure of the best way to go about it. I've read up on the importance of disk order with RAID builds and migration, so I think I have the correct order of disks documented and can handle that part fine. I'd like to be able to create a build with the latest version of DSM available on the new loader for server1. I was hoping to just reinitialize the 8TB disks in that machine with a new raid config (probably SHR as well) so I can migrate them to server 2 to use as a backup. My question is, once I set up Server 1 with a new loader, what will happen when I insert the disks from server 2 into this machine? What will happen when I insert disks from a machine running an older version of DSM? Should I rebuild the loader and upgrade server 2 to the newest DSM version before migrating the disks?

Did you get the prompt to update your app automatically or did you have to download the updated spk from Synology? That's more what my question is about - is it ok to pull the spk from synology servers? I know it is always frowned upon the utilize synology resources but I guess that's more like using some of those types of services that are ongoing connections like quickconnect or whatnot.

According to this article AI object recognition is finally available in the latest version of Photos. However, it is currently in phased rollout. The article includes a link where you can download the spk and do a manual install. Just wanted to make sure this is a safe option for xpenoligy builds. I would assume so but figured I would check here. I do have a build that corresponds to models that support the feature.

I have old tower PC running baremetal DSM 7.x with an SHR storage pool and two volumes. I constantly hear the drives grinding away from where it sits across the room from me, but cannot figure out what is causing this activity. I've tried shutting down every docker container as well as any running package that I am able to stop, still the spinning continues. The noise is a little annoying but not unbearable, but I am mainly concerned with premature drive failure if these drives are constantly reading/writing 24/7. How to I figure out what the culprit is? Task manager doesn't seem to show a level of activity comparable to the constant grind I am hearing.

I just finished a migration from my Dell T30 server (xeon, standard specs, 16GB ECC RAM, running baremetal DSM 6-something on jun 1.03b,) to an old desktop PC I had from back before NAS days (baremetal, converted to xpen using ARPL, latest possible DSM7-whatever). I actually built this thing like a tank since at the time it was my data hub as well as my center of operations. Nice big Antec case with plenty of room for drives (4 side facing bays with drive rails plus two more front facing), six SATA ports on the MB (ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen 3), Core i3 3.3GHz, 680W PSU. My original intent was to build my new SHR with all new disks on this old PC temporarily and then build a new loader for the T30, adding two more ports for SSD cache or extra storage via an LSI 9211-8i PCIe card if I can get it to work without much hassle. Then move the drives over to the T30. However this old PC is actually running DSM pretty darn well. The only downside is that it only has 8GB of RAM. I have two empty slots and see I can buy two more sticks relatively cheap. Just wondering if I should go for it and if the loader will need to be rebuilt to do so? As a side question, any opinions on using that much RAM on that board? I am not really well-versed in all the ins and outs of RAM and "when is it too much/diminished returns?" Will that Z68/i3 make good use of 16GB of memory? I think if I just let this thing carry on as my prod NAS, I can keep the T30 waiting in the wings whenever something fails on the old PC hardware. Maybe even keep it up as a test box. For now I'm just going to sit tight and hang on to that working system in case something crumbles in the first few weeks on this "new old" build.

Agreed, it will be a LOT easier to configure everything when I can keep looking back at the old system to see how things were set up. Moving the physical drives would be a last-resort type of scenario. Migration assistant has been up and running for 2-1/2 hours as of now, approximately 46 hours to complete.

Ah yeah that makes sense. I'll probably skip the source update then, I see a lot of successes in the updates reporting thread but one guy lost all his settings on the upgrade which is really the whole point for me to do the migration. If the migration fails for whatever reason I still have the data (plus backups) and can do all my setups again if I have to. Actually this old PC has six sata ports so I could always bring over one raid volume at a time and move the shared folders.

Synology Migration assistant has listed this "suggestion" in their requirements, and I am trying to understand what the implications are of not adhering to this: "We recommend updating the source device to DSM 6.0.3, 6.1.7, or 6.2.4, as well as updating all packages to the latest version." I am on 6.2.1 on the source device and from what I'm reading on this forum, going up to 6.2.4 doesn't look like a good option (mostly seeing failures in the updates reporting threads and most are jumping ship with the availability of the shiny new 7x and TCRP). Not sure if I should move forward with the version I have (and what problems might be associated) or if I should try to go through the trouble of possibly downgrading to a lesser version to meet the subversion requirement/suggestion. Anyone have any insight on why synology is making that recommendation? The TLDR of what I'm doing if you need context or have further insight/alternate methods: I have DSM running baremetal on a Dell T30 server that has been rock solid for several years. Current version DSM 6.2.1-23824 Update 6. I am trying to upgrade my storage pool with all new disks and opted to make an SHR volume with 2 x 8TB and 2 x 14TB disks. Since my current setup is running 4 x 8 TB disks in two RAID1 pairs, and no extra room for disks, I opted to pull out an old PC that was up to the task and managed to create a new baremetal DSM 7.1.1-42962 Update 2 using ARPL. I am building the SHR pool on that PC with the intent of running migration assistant to pull the data/settings from the T30 and then using ARPL to build a new loader on the t30 and swapping disks after the setup is done. Once everything looks good there I'll probably reformat my old disks to a new SHR volume and use the old PC as a test/backup box.

Hey there, I am currently running 4x 8TB in a Dell Poweredge T30, 16GB ecc ram, baremetal, DSM 6.2.1 , jun's loader, DS3617xs Want to go to DSM 7.? (whatever is current) plus upgrade HDs. The western digital BF sales got me buying up enough drives to build a new 30TB SHR volume with 4 drives (2x14TB and 2x8TB) Originally I was just going to change up what was in the server now (the current 4 drives are in two raid1 pairs), but the server is getting up there in age so I thought I might just build everything anew - especially since I need to upgrade to version 7 anyway, just makes sense to build a new server and do a migration00000 once complete. I am not at all familiar with the world of servers, but I have seen some good deals on some hefty hardware on ebay. Just looking for some advice on specs to choose, perhaps a model name recommendation? I looked at the hardware FAQ and it looks pretty outdated, only mentioning what runs 6.x well. Asks: under $300 used no OS needed at least 16GB ram at least 4 bays (hot swappable is a bonus but not necessary) SATA compatible relatively quiet (it will be in a music studio so typical workstation fan noise is about the tolerable level) Several (maybe 6+) usb ports to connect peripherals my main usage is as a plex server plus a radarr/sonarr/lidarr machine and general home NAS I see a lot of ebay hits for the "real" poweredge servers like r710, 720 etc for pretty cheap.