JimW

HP ProDesk 400 G1 Realtek integrated NIC 1.03b loader booted to wait screen, but link light amber on switch connected to integrated NIC in the PC. Synology assistant would not find the station. Tried everything on Jun's troubleshooting page and no luck. Switched to 1.0.2b loader. Link lights green and Syn assistant found the station immediately. Guess I'll use DSM 6.1.7 for now...

Thanks flyride, that's good information. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for RAID 5 the following limitations apply: I need at least three drives of the same size (unless I want to under utilize the larger drives) The only expansion I can do is add more drives of the same size or they will be under utilized To use larger drives in the future, I'd have to replace smaller ones one at a time and rebuild During the replacement cycle, the larger drives will be under utilized until all the smaller drives are replaced Where does DSM install itself initially? Would it be possible to force the OS to install on the SSD drive and dedicate the SSD to that and the other apps I want to host like PLEX? Thanks for all the great feedback everyone.

Worked perfectly. Thanks again.

If anyone's interested... Turns out someone had already been playing around with setting this up as a NAS. I wiped the drives, completed the build, and synology assistant found the station with the boot loader no problem. This time it had "not installed" listed in the status section and there was an "install" option in the right click menu. DSM successfully installed!

Dfds, That is totally awesome!! I'll give that a shot tonight and see how it works. Thanks a million.

A little background... I've been thinking about setting up a NAS for quite a while. Recently my family decided to digitize the entire stockpile of VHS and camcorder Hi8 home videos. After digitizing the first box, we calculate that it's going to take many terabytes to get it all done. Cloud storage is looking to be hundreds of dollars a year. So I decided to pull the trigger and build a NAS to store them all along with all my other media. I have Roku's all through the house and purchased PLEX. Roku's have a great PLEX application. My co-worker suggested building my own NAS to save money and have a NAS capable of supporting PLEX transcoding and various other computing intensive activities desirable on a NAS. I'm using a Windows box with an I-3 processor and 12 GB RAM that was laying around. It had a couple of 500 GB drives and I added 2 more 4 TB drives with the expectation of upgrading the 500's over time. In another thread on this forum, I was told that all I needed was a supported SATA 3.0 expansion card with the port density I wanted and let DSM's software RAID controller do the work. I went with that advice and installed a four port SATA 3.0 card to give me 6 ports total including the 2 motherboard SATA 3.0 ports. Currently the 4 drives are attached to the card. I had small spare SSD drive that I connected to the motherboard that I intend to use as a cache. After the hardware build, I followed these instructions: https://github.com/XPEnology/JunLoader/wiki/Installing-DSM-6.0-Bare-Metal and successfully installed DSM from the .pat file linked to in this tutorial. Using the two 500 GB drives was based on my co-worker's experience of using SHR to have a redundant RAID setup with different sized drives and the ability to swap out a bad drive with a larger drive and/or upgrade to larger drives in the future. However after the install, when attempting to build the RAID group, there is no SHR option. Some quick research revealed that not all versions of DSM support SHR. Here's a page that lists those versions: https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/tutorial/Storage/Which_models_have_limited_support_for_Synology_Hybrid_RAID_SHR Looking in the specs of my DSM install shows that it thinks it's a DSM3615xs device. Sure enough, this is listed on the above page as not supporting SHR. So my questions are, should I pursue trying to install a version of DSM that does support SHR with the xpenology boot loader? I really like the idea of being able to use what ever size drives I want. If I set up a traditional RAID, I'll need to purchase two more 4 TB drives now and then I'd have to start all over if I want to increase drive size instead of adding more 4 TB drives. If SHR is desirable, what version of DSM should I use and where do I get it? Thanks

I realized that I had the 5.2 version of the assistant installed and I'm trying to install the DSM_DS3615xs_8451.pat file per the instructions. I uninstalled that and got a more recent copy of synology assistant: But unfortunately no change. The status column still reads ready even though I haven't installed anything yet. I've only booted to the boot loader screen on the flash drive and the box is on the waiting screen of the boot loader. Here's what my assistant screen looks like: As you can see the status column reads "Ready" even though nothing is installed yet. I found some documentation in the assistant. Here's the status table: Apparently from the documentation I should be seeing "Not Installed" and then the assistant would let me double click the entry for my discovered station and start the installation wizard. Since it's showing "Ready" there's no way for me to actually install. Has anyone run into this? How do I get it to show "Not Installed"? Thanks

I'm working from these instructions: https://github.com/XPEnology/JunLoader/wiki/Installing-DSM-6.0-Bare-Metal I've created a flash drive boot loader and the box I'm working with boots to the waiting screen successfully. I then tried the web assistant and it can't find the synology station. I downloaded the synology assistant PC app and it does find the new station on my network. The instructions referenced above simply say at that point, "start the installation wizard". However I don't see that anywhere in the assistant and the status column shows "ready" instead of an installation message. I tried connecting, but I can't get past the login screen probably because it's actually not really installed yet with the .pat file I downloaded. What am I doing wrong? Thanks

Hey Flyride, Thanks for setting me straight on this subject. I thought DSM needed a RAID controller. Having never seen or worked with DSM, I had no idea that it implemented RAID in software. Your advice is great and I will do exactly what you said. Search for the SATA controller chips that are compatible, have the port density I need, and are implemented with mini PCIe for this motherboard. Cheers!

I have an HP prodesk 400 G1 laying around and have decided to build a NAS. My co-worker recommended this operating system and I've created a flash drive boot loader. It looks like it will work, so the next step is to populate it with disks and a RAID controller. The HP prodesk has three mini PCIe interfaces on the motherboard. I think I can fit 4 or 5 HDD's in the case. Can someone recommend the best mini PCIe RAID card for something like this? Thanks in advance.