roadkill401 Posted February 1, 2015 Share #1 Posted February 1, 2015 I know that quite often I can be as thick at two planks of wood. I am totally lost here. I have downloaded the XPEnoboot.x64 and it contains 3 files. There is an img, iso and vmdk file. My objective is to give this a try and figure it out. I own 3 Synology boxes and just want to make up a 4th box that is just going to basicaly be a big disk that I can use to backup the other units to. My thought was that as I have a mac right now with VMware Fusion, that I could make a VM to test out the process and learn on, then when I am ready and comfortable, go out and buy an inexpensive PC and make up a large drive case unit. They have some really nice 12bay 4u cases with 12 hotswap bays for $250 near me. I take it I will need some intel bases mb with the SATA ports, and add a 2 more 4port sata cards to bring me up to my 12, and the XPnology resides on a USB drive that boots. So by my plan I need to get it working on VMware Fusion first. I can make a VM and boot from the XPEnoboot.iso file and it brings up grub fine with 3 options. All of them boot fine and end up with me with a login prompt: and no idea what goes next. If I run the DSAssistant, all I see are my own 3 Synology boxes and the VM is nowhere to be seen. OK. I figured out that I needed to remove the SCSI disk and add in an IDE disk or two.. now I am seeing the server. So, I will ask part 2, Is there any specific hardware that is required as I will be going out to buy this. I cannot get one of these elusive N40L units are there are none around me and really i just need a lowest cost solution I can put into a 12 bay box and load up with my misc SATA drives to give me a honking big drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roadkill401 Posted February 1, 2015 Author Share #2 Posted February 1, 2015 From digging even deeper into the specs on the machine... it looks like the DS3615 does not support any of the SHR functions that the smaller workgroup models do. That would mean that trying to use the drives that I have laying around would be a bit more pointless. (I have 3+3+2+2+2+2+1+1+1+1 so in SHR I would have 15tb + 3tb parity.. on RAID5 the best I could get is 10 by just using everything as a 2tb drive and not put in the 1tb drives at all) I am wondering if there is anything specific about the DS3615 that makes this the unit of choice? like could you by chance make up a version based on say the DS1815+ that is also an intel chipset but does support the SHR share set?? Also, from looking at the chipsets. I see that the DS3615 uses the intel i3 4130 chip. I am wondering if using a 4150 would also work as it turns out to be availible for me and less expensive, just slightly faster and a few more instructions sets too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmcnano Posted February 1, 2015 Share #3 Posted February 1, 2015 The 3615 does not support SHR but the xpenology image does. You can get an asrock avalon octa-core board with 12 sata drives. I read it works perfectly fine and the performance is great. Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roadkill401 Posted February 1, 2015 Author Share #4 Posted February 1, 2015 Digging through my old stuff laying around. I have an old AMD X4, but I tried that with a USB and it doesn't find any network card in the unit, so I am writing that machine off as a lost cause. It does work with Windows, but that is just about it. I dug a bit deeper, and found a quite new Asus P8B75-M/CSM motherboard. Now that supports the Intel i3-4150 cpu that I can get relatively cheep, but the network card on the board is listed as a Realtek 8111f. Now looking, it seems that the 8111f is very close to the Realtek 8169 that I have seen posting when google searching. pmcnano -- you said the ASROCK board might work for me.. just to make sure are you talking about this one? http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157475 I also see that this unit looks to have 3 nic interfaces. (2x intel i210 + Realtek RTL8211E) does all 3 work or just the two intel ones? Thankyou for all the help offered. it really is appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CtrlAltDel Posted February 1, 2015 Share #5 Posted February 1, 2015 One of the NIC's is the APMI for remote access and system management (see the Management section of the spec. sheet). The two intels would be the ones you would use for your network connections. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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