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New user, bare metal on Gen8


scoobydoofus

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Hi, been reading for a while, just signed up to check I’m on the right track and ask a few questions. I have searched and didn’t find specific answers, a lot of info that came up is a couple of years old so I’m sorry if I ask stuff that’s easy to find.

 

Just took the plunge and ordered an HP Gen8 (the basic one with the G1610T). Didn’t spring for any extra memory yet because I read that Xpenology installed bare metal should be fine with the 2GB it comes with, I only need more if I install via ESXi (seems like overkill for my needs). Having said that, I can always add RAM later if I need to.

 

After spending ages looking at various OSs, I plan to install Xpenology to store media files for streaming around my home: Plex, maybe iTunes server, and SAB/Transmission. Everything I’ve read says that this box will work fine for that.

 

First question: the Gen8 has an internal MicroSD slot - can I use that as the boot device, or do I have to use USB?

 

My plan is to buy one large drive (3 or 4TB) initially and gradually add more over the next few months until all the bays are full. I’m not totally paranoid about losing data, my important stuff would be backed up elsewhere, but i like the idea of redundancy so I don’t lose everything if a drive fails. I’ve never used RAID before, but I’ve read up on SHR and fiddled with the demo on the Synology site but it doesn’t let you add/remove drives so I’m not really sure how it works.

 

I’d rather have one big volume to save messing with moving files around etc, but is that a good idea? Would I be better off with a couple of smaller volumes? I’d like to use this box as a Time Machine backup too; should I use one bay for that and keep the other three for my media, or would I be safe to use one single big volume for all my media AND backups?

 

This is more of a general Synology question really but I currently have all my stuff on external USB drives. If I plug them into the Gen8 do they get mounted in Xpenology so that the Plex server can use it as a source, or are the USB ports just for copying stuff to the internal drives?

 

Finally, is there anything I need to worry about with regards to updating the BIOS etc on the Gen8? I planned to update everything before I started with Xpenology but I’ve read about issues with USB not working and loud fans (again, I think they were old posts but couldn’t really see any recent ones to suggest otherwise).

 

Thanks for reading my epically long first post, would appreciate any advice or feedback!

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I've had my Gen8 about three weeks now and XPE goes straight on without indecent. I've used the internal USB rather than the SD simply because I had a next to useless 256MB stick kicking around.

 

BIOS was up to date when it arrived, so that was nice. I have 4 x 1TB drives in RAID-5 and 'split' it into different shares rather than different volumes.

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I've had my Gen8 about three weeks now and XPE goes straight on without indecent. I've used the internal USB rather than the SD simply because I had a next to useless 256MB stick kicking around.

 

BIOS was up to date when it arrived, so that was nice. I have 4 x 1TB drives in RAID-5 and 'split' it into different shares rather than different volumes.

 

 

Hi Rusty,

 

Do you have the same model Gen 8, the basic one with 2GB RAM? What version DSM did you install, and is it nice and quiet or do the fans run loud?

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Hi Rusty,

 

Do you have the same model Gen 8, the basic one with 2GB RAM? What version DSM did you install, and is it nice and quiet or do the fans run loud?

Yes the basic 2GB G1610T one, it's pretty quiet, and I'm currently on 5.1 with the newest boot image.

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