We've managed to fill up all of the hard drive space I put in the NAS (Jerry) Thankfully it hasn't been too critical and we have been able to continue as normal basically without noticing that we can't store anything more on there.
However this is something that does need to be fixed. So I bought some more hard drives. I'm using Western Digital Greens from ebay with the head park adjusted with WDIDLE3 to extend their life. I know these are not ideal drives for use in a NAS, but they are cheap and the RAID 6 configuration means that I have time for a new drive to arrive if one dies.
Here I am setting the head park idle time to reduce the number of head parks which can wear out these green drives quite quickly as the default time is very short. It makes sense when you think they are designed for absolute minimum power consumption, but it can be a problem.
I don't have a computer set up as a test bench for doing stuff like this so I have to pull some cables out of my normal use desktop.It's not too bad to have to do. But all the same having the space for a dedicated machine with swappable drive bays for this sort of thing would be nice.
Make sure you label your CD's!!! I had a dozen or so un-labeled disks I had to go through to find my boot CD. They have now all been labeled and put in a sensible spot.
The new drives are in. This means that I just need to expand the array and it will all be done, right? Not quite. Turns out that you can't expand an array using a p400 RAID controller if the battery backup for the cache is busted. Thankfully these parts can be had for only a few dollars from ebay.
The replacement part.
Drag the whole mess out.
Apparently orange = bad.
And here we have it. The new part in and all ready to go. It was a pretty simple replacement however there were one or two parts that had to be jiggled the right way to come free.
Here we are, expanding the array. Unfortunately I think the whole data set has to go through the cache on the card which is only 256 mb or thereabouts. The array is approximately doubling to about 4.5 tb which is a lot to have to shift through 256 mb. I'm expecting this should be finished copying by the end of the weekend but that is pretty much a guess.
Once the RAID card has expanded the drive I think I will need to expand the filesystem so I will do a writeup on that because I will need to remember as well.
One of my relatives who recently got a computer upgrade had the old Hard Drive from the old machine and was concerned that there could be some sensitive data on it still. So, being the helpful young man I am I volunteered to destroy any data that might be hiding in there still.
This is where we start, It's an older IDE drive that I could probably use in one of my machines, but I have given in to the SATA cables and now I have a very hard time justifying why I should be keeping a drive that needs a ribbon cable, so I won't.
These are what hold the top on. These are just a normal Torx T8 screw. If you buy a small toolkit from Jaycar or many other electronics hobby stores you will probably find it includes some of these.
There's a sneaky one here hiding under the label. Make sure you unscrew it because otherwise no matter how hard you try, that top isn't coming off.
Once all the screws are out just prise around the edges with a screwdriver or another fairly thin tool.
The top should come off fairly easily after that, if not look for more screws under the label. (Ask me how I know.) If you look closely you can see there is a bead of some kind of semi flexible sealant around the edge of the lid. This is to keep air and more importantly dust out. These drives are assembled in a cleanroom type environment as any particles can significantly reduce the life and reliability of these.
Some drives do have a vent in them. Those that do always have some kind of filter over the vent to keep contamination out of the drive. The vent is required as during operation the internals of the drive change temperature. This causes the air inside to expand and it needs somewhere to go, otherwise it may damage the case.
Here we can see the interesting parts of the drive. The big silver disk is the platter where the data is actually stored. The metal arm that is pointing to near the center of the platter is the read/write head. The very end of it floats on an air bearing when the drive comes up to speed. If the air bearing fails for whatever reason the head can crash into the platter which can cause scratches and other damage.
This is a short video I put together of me destroying this Hard Disk. Don't watch if you have strong Hard Drive sympathies.
For anyone who doesn't want to load the video this is what the top of the platter looked like after machining it with a screwdriver bit.
I don't think anything is going to be recovered from this drive. But to be sure I'm going to be keeping a magnet on top of it and moving it occasionally, just to be sure.
If there's anything else you want to see inside and/or tortured like this drop a not in the comments and we'll see what I can do.
Sometimes you just can't do things the "right" way straight off the bat.
This is a great example of that. I've been trying to get Jerry (The NAS server) working so we can share files among our LAN. Unfortunately the RAID card in there doesn't like to play nicely with *BSD so I've gone back to Linux which I know. And has drivers for the card.
Unfortunately I couldn't find an easy way to boot from the USB drive that FreeNAS was using. So I had to use a normal Hard Drive. The only one I had spare with SATA was a little 2.5" laptop drive. That is fine, except I don't have 2.5" caddys for the bays in the front and I can't see any other spots to put this. So I've attached it to the backplane and you can see to do that it couldn't be sitting right on the bottom of the tray. However if I left it like that there could be problems with dust or rodents. So I slipped a normal caddy in, lifting up the front of the drive a little to slide it under.
Hmmm, a bit sketchy, but it let me test this idea without spending money or stupid amounts of time on it.
It's in the bottom tray here, just before I boot to test this. The middle caddy has my big drive and is unplugged to make sure it doesn't cause issues. The top one is just a blanking caddy.
So sometimes you can get away with doing something without having everything perfect. So don't let the fact that it's not the best way to do something don't let it stop you from doing it.
My new server arrived. It is a HP Prolient DL 320S and has 12 drive bays in the front.
Unfortunately it only came with 3 drive caddies that will hold drives. There are 3 open spaces and the other 6 spaces are filled with blank things. Presumably to maintain proper airflow across all of the drives all the time. Unfortunately because of that they cannot be used for putting drives in. This means that for RAID 6 I need at least 4 Drives. Particularly if I want to keep my 2TB drive in there that I have at the moment I will need at least 6 more spaces for drives. So I need to get at least 2 more bays.
This is my precious. A 2TB SATA Hard Drive. This is really wat I have everything that I really don't want to lose on. As I said above I would like to move to a RAID 6 array for storage. However for now as long as I still have the space I can live with no redundency for now.
It boots !
It even has a GUI. Surely the first thing I have used in a while that has a GUI for system management stuff.
However the first problem I have found with the software I'm using. The GUI only shows support for Ext2. The 2TB drive has my data on it in an Ext4 partition. This is my only drive this big. Thankfully there is less than 1TB of data on it which means that I can use my external Hard Drive. Unfortunately it is currently also formatted Ext4.
So with the 2TB drive plugged into my only other computer that can plug into it, I have also connected my external drive and am reformatting the external drive.
This would be only a little bit dodgy. However apparently formatting a drive in Windows Vista takes a long time. It's been a few hours but it is still only at 20% so this will be sitting until tomorrow afternoon. Such is life.
But I have found a new home for the NAS. For now anyway.
It is on the floor but I don't think it will be a problem. It will probably be moving a fair few times yet so this won't be the last place it lives I dare say.
So the beginning for a very exciting project. But still a little way to go before I am happy with the way it is set up.
No I haven't re-built the kitchen. For the last 18 or so months I have been running a number of servers from this:
It doesn't look like much. And in terms of "real" professional servers it isn't. However it has been more than good enough for me. Unfortunately there are some things I am not really that happy about. Recently I have become very fond of Arch Linux and have been enjoying some of it's features more than the Debian that is installed on this server. I know Debian is probably better for servers, but I'm just doing this at home for fun. So I'll do what I want.
The other main thing I haven't been so happy about is storage.
This is what the case looked like after I opened it up for the 1st time in 18 months. Probably a record for one of my computers. As you can see, arranged across the bottom is my network storage array. A jumble of random drives that has very little rhyme or reason, other than I could get my hands on them for the right price.
What they look like out of the case.
This is going to be changing soon. I have bought a case on ebay that will hopefully work as a NAS box. This will be my next big server thing to do. Also depending on how I'm going, this jumble of random drives will probably be dispersed somewhat and the old 20GB drives either retired from server, or relegated to use as boot drives with regular backups. Probably boot disks.
Another thing I will be probably looking at is airflow. Mainly with regards to dust. The house I live in is not new and has had plenty of time to start producing dust. Also this house doesn't have a dedicated server room with filtered AC. Bummer. This however is nothing new and hopefully I can reduce the amount of dust in this case (and the new one) with some slightly (?) informed planning of case ventilation.
I haven't decided on what software I'm going to run on the NAS box yet. That will have to wait until I get it. But I am starting to realise that the hodge podge of HDDs and no actual backup is really, really quite bad. So I dare say that both of those things will change in the future, even if I keep them like this for now.
However if you do happen to have a bunch of reasonable sized HDDs burning a hole in your pocket I know a quiet place where they can go to stay.
