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Xpenology with 12 disk


Ulleman

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Hi,

Anyone in this forum who are able to get xpenology up and running with 12 SATA disk? I have 12 x 3TB, and would like to use them in my system. Which raidcontroller will work? Or is it better to find a motherboard with 12 SATA. Thanks in advance

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I'm using the supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 (marvell chipset) in several XPE boxes. SAS to sata conversion leads. Work fine and as its an older card you can pick them up from ebay pretty cheap. If your mobo has 4 sata ports, and 1 PCIe x4 slot this would give you a 12 bay system, exactly my setup.

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Be aware with LSI controllers that drive number could be all over the place, i.e. Phyiscal bay 1 may not be drive 1 in DSM. As I'm currently using an LSI 9211-8i (8 port internal 6G SAS) that doesn't do order in DSM currently and I am using direct cables (SAS > 4 x SATA) I'm going to be playing with the LSI settings to try and get them to work... Otherwise I would try and keep to cards that do numbering properly for easy drive finding.

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I'm using the supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 (marvell chipset) in several XPE boxes. SAS to sata conversion leads. Work fine and as its an older card you can pick them up from ebay pretty cheap. If your mobo has 4 sata ports, and 1 PCIe x4 slot this would give you a 12 bay system, exactly my setup.

 

I've bought an AOC-SASLP-MV8 controller, and all 8 disks are shown as OK in bios. Unfortunatly I can only see 4 disk in an fresh installation of Xpenology (XPEnoboot 5.2-5644.5 (14/02/2016)) do You know why? I cant see any way in bios i can configure it.

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I'm using this bios on the controller

ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SAS/Mar ... /3.1.0.21/

 

I'm also running 5644.4 release of xpe, its possible the mvsas drivers have been left out of .5 so try and earlier version - when you boot xpe, watch for the driver loading - it will be a line like 'mvsas2' and it will be 'busy' for a few seconds while it loads and sets up the disks.

Set all sata to IDE mode.

Also, in the mobo bios, check the boot options - you should be able to see all the drives on the controller as boot choices. If they are its a possible driver problem.

I've got a spare MV8, I'll test here what I've said above and update later

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ok, tested here with .5 and a single drive on the MV8.

The driver loads and I can see the disk in Storage Manager so the controller is still supported in .5

 

Some other thoughts - Make sure you choose 'Install/Upgrade' mode from XPE boot menu before you install DSM

Disable the on-board sata adapters, XPE has a default of 12 disks and if your combined count of controller channels is more than that, some of them wont show up, you may have to adjust the configuration in DSM to see the drives on your controllers, or leave some disabled in the bios.

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Thx for quick reply. I tried to disable all the sata controlleres got this mobo : Asrock Z77 pro 4-M. It got 8 sata and im using 4. When im disabling the sata and no disk connected to sata, all 8 disk are availible in Xpenology. I wil try to set disk in IDE mode and not AHCI. When 4 disk are connected to mobo sata, they are hown as external sata?

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Ok this is beginning to make sense.

IDE mode on the onboard sata is a must, drives wont show up in ahci

Onboard = 8 sata + MV8 = 8 sata = 16 drives, so some will not show up without config changes to synoinfo.conf, thats probably why some are showing as esata too. If you look for forum threads about having >12 drives and editing synoinfo you will understand.

Looking at the Asus spec - I would disable the four sata2 speed channels leaving the four sata3 enabled (grey connectors?). With the MV8 you should see 12 drives.

Good Luck!

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my personal experience of HDD 'reliability' over the years is that you previously got a drive from all the lead players with a 3 or 5 year warranty. That has slowly dropped to 1 year (even for some NAS rated drives), I think only Toshiba have 2 year warranty. I've got Hitachi 2TB drives that have been running since 2007 in my various syno boxes, and Seagate drives that have died after a year.

I think makers 'grade' drives based on post production tests then then sell based on the quality of the resulting errors and component measurements.

I avoid both entry level drives and NAS spec ones, and go for good quality desktop drives and rely on SHR1 to handle the risk - oh and I also have full backups of everything critical to another SHR1 'jukebox', using my 'oldest' drives, which only powers on and off to handle the backups.

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Octavean, what HDD's do you mean?

Seagate Archive HDD? WD Green? WD Purple?

 

 

Posted via Xpenology.us

 

 

I mean how WD Red 3 year warranty drives are stated to be for use with up to 8 HDD in a NAS / server whereas WD Red Pro drives with a 5 year warranty are stated to be for use in NAS / servers with up to 16 drives. Supposedly, according to what I can gather from WD promo info, the difference in number of supported drives has to do with increased vibration dampening support in the pro version. The implication there is that more drives increase vibration and that the WD Red Pro drives are better designed to handle said vibration without ill effect,.....(although this was no explicitly stated).

 

So I guess my question is whether or not this is true?

 

I have no doubt that we could slap in 20+ HDD of any type in one case but does this detract from the longevity of the drives due to increased vibration?

 

In my case I have three Rosewill RSV-SATA-Cage-34 Hot-Swap backplanes with 4 bays each totaling 12 bays. I currently have 8 HDDs installed (2x3TB and 6x4TB) in Volume 1 using SHR2 for a total of about ~20TB usable. All HDDs are WD Red (non-Pro). I recently had to remove a WD Green 3TB, Seagate 3TB and Seagate 4TB due to issues.

 

I'm at the point where I might want to start going beyond 8 HDDs so I was wonder if there was anything to this. I have been interested in the WD Red Pro drives largely due to their longer warranty but I am a little reluctant to pay more for the Pro version and I already have a bunch of relatively new non-Pro,....

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Hi,

Anyone in this forum who are able to get xpenology up and running with 12 SATA disk? I have 12 x 3TB, and would like to use them in my system. Which raidcontroller will work? Or is it better to find a motherboard with 12 SATA. Thanks in advance

 

I'm running 13 SATA drivers. I'm currently using a LSI 9211-8i compatible card + SAS2 Expander. Very reliable. The key to seeing all your drives is to modify /etc.defaults/synoinfo.conf and adjust the the ports settings to match your drive enumeration.

 

Oh, and I don't worry about having correct slot number matching. Just use the serial number to determine which drive needs service if necessary. Having correctly mapped drive bay numbering would be nice, but in no way does it impede any functionality if it doesn't.

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