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Adding Network Adapters and Sata Controllers Post Install


a575606

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I recently upgraded from a DS 1512+ to a custom Xpenology using old gaming pc parts I had laying around. It's been a real success and now I'd like to upgrade some of the hardware. I used the onboard lan and sata when I set things up. I'd like to add an intel dual gbe pcie card and set up link aggregation. Secondly the motherboard has 2 6bps sata ports and 4 3Gbps sata ports. So I'd like to add a 4 port Marvell sata card and have all drives on 6Gbps sata. 

 

With the lan, other than changing the mac address in the grub.cfg is there anything else I need to do? Any preparation needed? I'd just like to avoid having to set up DSM again if possible. I found one thread talking about this topic, but I wondered if anyone else has added/swapped hardware post installation and had any advice? There wasn't a lot of detail in the posts about what the best way to go about changing network adapters was. Or can I just add the dual lan card and keep the onboard, leaving me with 3 lan ports? 

 

Secondly, has anyone added a sata controller? Can I just shut down the server, disable the 4port onboard sata and put the drives in the same order on the new card? Or is there more to it than that? Any advice would be appreciated. 

 


Thanks for the help and also for everyone who helped make Xpenology happen, I've certainly got a huge amount of value from it. 

 

 

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1 - no problem adding a NIC as long as it is supported by the drives found in the loader,

no need to disable the current, or to edit the MAC, but read on...

What might happen is: your current NIC, named LAN-1 in DSM, and eth0 in linux is "presenting itself" with the MAC1=... in grub.cfg,

when adding another nic, that might be seen as eth0 by linux, and the specified MAC1 will be applied to that nic,

if that is the real MAC of your first nic, you will end up with 2 nic's with the same MAC (and possible IP if using DHCP) causing some confusion (been there, done that).

So if you want to keep all 3 lan ports running, you better edit the grub.cfg, adding all 3 MAC addresses.

 

2 - sata controller, depending on how your current drive-layout is, in regards to RAID level, Drive group etc. it might be easy or hard ;-)

 

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Hi @bearcat, thanks for the reply. So for #1, if I add all 3 mac addresses in grub.cfg I should be fine? It will boot straight into DSM as usual (with any luck)? How do I make sure the 'main' adapter is the new adapter, not the onboard lan? Whatever is set as Mac1 is the main adapter, i.e. Lan-1 in DSM?

 

As for #2, I figured. Ok here's the layout:

 

6 disks in a single volume, synology hybrid raid, ext4. They're installed as follows:

 

Sata 0,1 - 2 port onboard Marvell sata 3 controller - disks 1 and 2 in DSM (I want to keep using this controller)

Sata 2,3,4,5 - 4 port onboard Intel (?) sata 2/3 controller - disks 3-6 in DSM

 

Basically I want to install a 4 port pci marvell sata controller, move disks 3-6 to the new controller in the same order, and disable those onboard ports if necessary.

 

So will this be an easy one or a hard one?

Edited by a575606
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  • 2 weeks later...

As stated ... it might be easy or it might be hard :35_thinking: but I think it will be all OK with your config.

Just make sure you disable the onboard ports before adding the HDD's (in the same order) on the new controller.

But as always, make sure your backup files are up-to-date before doing any big changes :-)

 

btw: since I have not tried to do "this thing" myself, I ordered a small controller do try it out in person :cool: will be here tomorrow :91_thumbsup:

 

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@a575606 :

 

My  "microscopic" new SATA controller arrived yesterday, and today I had some spare time to do a test.

As the picture will tell, it all went well (with my setup).

The first pic show how it was originally,

Nr 2 show what happened after I installed the new controller while keeping the original enabled, and used as before.

In nr 3 I have moved 1 of my drives, that is in a RAID-0 config to the new controller, keeping the other where it was.

And finally, in nr 4 I moved the other drive to the new controller.

 

As you see, the "only" difference between the pic's are the position of used/free slots.

 

Notice: my drives are configured in a Storage Pool as RAID-0, ext4.

 

 

Storage1.png

Storage2.png

Storage3.png

Storage4.png

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Well, very encouraging. I will get my 4 port card today or tomorrow so hope it goes as smoothly as it went for you. Then I just have to decide whether it's worth the headache to migrate from ext4 to btrfs :/.

 

When I first installed xpenology I was so impressed it worked I was afraid to touch anything for fear of breaking it. Since then I've been even more impressed how stable and resilient it is.

 

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@a575606 I don't think you got the same as me, as I only got a 2 port card.

 

I was getting the Delock 95260, a Mini PCIe half size card, using the Asmedia ASM1061 chipset, supporting 6Gb/s on the SATA ports, but limited to 5Gb/s on the PCI Express. It fits well in the free slot on my Asrock Q1900-ITX, leaving the fullsize PCIe-slot free for a 10Gb NIC or something els if I find a need for it :-)

Delock_95260.png

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@bearcat, well, where I come from they say the small peppers are the hot ones ;) . All installed and SUCCESS!!. and at first when I realized I couldn't disable the onboard sata in the bios I was a bit worried, but I kept the drives in the same order so I just booted and it was business as usual in DSM. Yes like you, the used / available shifted around, but I'm now running 2 drives connected to the onboard jmicron sata controller and the other 4 connected to the pci-e card. And I suppose I now have 4 available sata 3G ports, but I'm not sure if I need to do anything in the grub.cfg to use those. Any thoughts?

 

The card is generic, made in china bought off aliexpress. The chipset, however is Marvell 88SE9215

20190223_121451.jpg

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Well, after rebooting, volume still crashed. Followed by a tense shutdown, swap cables back to old sata ports and reboot, the volume showed as healthy, but system partition was corrupt. Ran a repair which succeded, but storage manager recommended checking the file system, which I'm running now. 304 minutes remaining. Fingers crossed, but looking like no data loss.

 

Not sure if it's a faulty card or compatibility problem, maybe moving part of the volume, or something else. I have an old hard drive or two laying around. I'll do some more tests using drives i don't care about. But definitely not taking any more risks with my data until I can isolate the issue and resolve it.

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last update... file system check succeeded. running data scrubbing. at first glance i thought I'd lost all packages, but turns out they were all stopped. so after running all installed packages everything seems to be working fine.

 

Any thoughts on what could cause the volume crash? A bit nerve racking the thought of trying again, but I don't want to give up. Maybe it would work better if I tried to return the 4 port card and got an 8 port dual Marvell card instead? such as: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/PCIe-SATA-expansion-Card-pci-express-to-sata3-0-8-ports-expansion-card-pci-e-sata/32867904622.html

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Oh crap... seem's like your config was not as forgiving as mine, at least my testbox is still running all OK.

Not sure what to think, but if your no-name card had some problems that might explain why all "the sh*t is in the fan" (even if your CPU is watercooled ;-) )

From what others have reported, the 88SE9215 chipset should be compatible, so unless there is something wrong with your card, this should have worked.

Especially after moving it all back as it was, your system should have been able to repair and run as before.

 

What about the drives themself, have you checked the SMART status lately? 

I bet you made sure all the cables was properly connected?

 

 

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Hi again. Well, yesterday wasn't my day, but things started getting much better when the raid array finally finished its re sync. It seems like that was causing a lot of the performance issues and errors. Finished getting the last package running today.

 

But I haven't given up! I don't know if part of the array being moved caused the issue or who knows, maybe a cable was loose but doubtful. I cleaned of a couple old wd green 1 tbs that I had in the closet. Unfortunately I'm out of sata power connectors,but I'm tracking some down so I can try out the drives. Maybe building a volume on that card will be more stable. Let's see.  Thanks for listening to my freak out yday

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  • 2 months later...

I ended up returning that card and got a different one, an 8 port marvel. Maybe it was faulty but any time i plugged drives into it, the raid array would fail after a short amount of time. No data loss but scary nonetheless

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Just found this:

 

https://xpenology.org/ search for 4-Port Internal SATA3

 

Here is the card thats been confirmed as compatible: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00AZ9T3OU/ref=as_li_tl?slotNum=10&ie=UTF8&linkCode=g12&linkId=N6LNKJWVN7MPD22U&imprToken=M9OUQiyIBF97EfSr8DMKKw&creativeASIN=B00AZ9T3OU&tag=jmf421-21&creative=390957&camp=1789

 

If the one ive ordered doesnt work I'll try this one

 

Mike

Edited by Mike54
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