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Setup advice


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Hi folks,

 

I'm new to XPEnology and so far I'm loving it. I used to own a couple of Synology CS407e diskstations so I'm familiar with DSM.

 

I have an unused pc that I want to re-purpose as a DSM machine. I've been playing around with XPEnology the last two weeks and I could use some advice about setting up my box.

 

Hardware specs:

Motherboard: Asus M4A78-Pro

CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 245

RAM: 6GB (3x 2GB, fourth dimm slot is not working)

5x HDD

HDD 1: Western Digital 160GB SATA II (boot drive running Windows 7 Ultimate x64) (AHCI mode)

HDD 2 - HDD 5: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB SATA II (AHCI mode)

 

Since I currently do not have the option to run backups because of the lack of backup drives (and the cash) I'd like to setup the four Spinpoint drives in RAID 5.

I'm running DSM 5.1 as a guest OS in VirtualBox.

My question is, where is it best to setup the RAID 5? On the host (RAID controller card) or on the guest (SHR on DSM using VMDK files)?

 

As a side note, I'm not stuck on Windows 7. I'd install any OS as long as I can run SABnzbd, Sonarr. CouchPotato and Plex (I know all of them do run in DSM). And preferably Filebot too.

Or would it be possible to run DSM bare-metal on this box?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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I would try bare-metal install. Before you commit to it you can test if hardware is compatible.

Disconnect your Win7 drive and boot from the USB flashdrive with latest XPEnoboot. You will see if network card and drives are recognized by DSM.

Software RAID (SHR) by DSM will be the best choice from performance, flexibility and recovery standpoints.

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Well that didn't work :cry:

 

The M4A78-Pro board notoriously doesn't boot from USB automatically.

It gets stuck with "Checking NVRAM..." message on screen. Pressing F8 to popup the boot menu doesn't work either

 

 

It probably will boot from USB if I leave the Win7 drive connected and hit F8 to popup the boot menu, but I don't know whether it'll ruin my Win7 drive... Besides, I'd want it to boot from USB automatically.

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