Intro:
Our home has an old DNS-323 NAS from ~2007; it is setup in a combo of JBOD, and RAID1 using the Dlink software. It is also slow, averaging about 10MB/s with a 1.4GB test folder.
It is now full, and the RAID1 side of things is reporting some degradation when logging into the web interface. I believe it has the disks configured to give about 800GB of storage...
Thus I started my search for a present day NAS solution. I was intrigued by the consumer grade Synology offering DS-218J which looked to have a few features for a price of around $210-$250CDN from various vendors. It also apparently offers software that allows syncing of photos/videos from smartphones.
I did some reading on FreeNAS (open source NAS software) and came across a cult of 'ECC RAM' Nazi's in the forums that discuss FreeNAS... more googling lead me to an alternative Open Source NAS software called OpenMediaVault (OMV). I decided to give OMV a try if I could reuse an old computer, or keep the budget below that of an All-in-One NAS solution...
Boxing day had some 4TB WD NAS HDD locally for sale for $125, but I did not pick them up as I was supporting the economy by purchasing parts to go in a Gaming Computer.
Amazon had the same HDD on sale for $130 with free shipping for PRIME members, but when I went to order, it would only allow one HDD purchase per Prime account. I was able to order a 2nd one through my sister's Prime account. Those drives will arrive today.
I also looked in our basement and found our old, really dusty computer. It was a HP A6137c (Pavilion something or other). I looked up the specs online and found it would be a Core 2 Duo Processor in the E4x00 line... It also had all 4 DRAM slots populated... It also had 2 HDD still plugged in (SATA 1) on motherboard. One was 320GB, the other was 500GB. I believe this was our main PC from 2007ish to 2012ish before it was retired.
After taking it outside to blow off the rather large dust bunnies, I plugged in a monitor, keyboard, mouse and booted it up, and was happy to see that it booted slowly to Windows Vista.
I decided this would be a worthwhile experiment, to see if I could build one with recycled parts I already had, plus a few parts from the local Computer Store...
Attempt one of the NAS project would be to see if I could get the OS and OMV installed on this machine.
Machine Specs
- Mid Tower case with an Optical drive.
- Pentium Core 2 Duo E4400 running at 2.0ghz
- 4 GB RAM
- 4 USB 2.0 ports in the back, none up front that I can see.
- 4 SATA 1 connectors
- 275W PSU
- 320GB HDD (will be reused for the OS), 500GB not used as of now in this build.
- 1 PCIe x1 slot
- 2 PCI slots
- on board video and sound.
- 100 Mbps Ethernet port onboard, - now upgraded with DLink DGE-530T PCI - Gigabit ethernet card... (more on that later)
I spent most of Saturday working on this project on and off... Trip to the computer store to buy the DGE-530T Gigabit card, and a few 16GB USB 3.0 drives. I had planned on using PLOP Boot Manager - https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html to boot from USB, as this computer is too old to support booting from USB in the BIOS.
Putting on the PLOP Boot Manager on CD-R bootable was successful, but the system would hang when trying to boot from the selected USB key (It could find the USB key attached, but various combinations of keystrokes (SHIFT -U, CTRL -U, ALT-U) could not get my computer to boot up from USB. I am not sure if it's because I put the Boot Image on a USB 3.0 Thumbdrive, and it's only a USB 2.0 port or not.... I spent a couple hours on the PLOP/ USB scenario, but was not successful. There may be some info online about this issue.... https://superuser.com/questions/1268430/ubuntu-installation-on-usb-3-0-key-wont-boot-on-other-system
Learning moment #1
During this time, I was able to familiarize myself a bit with CD burners.... I have some old 10 yr old CD media, some of it only supports 8x -write CD-R , I also have some newer CD-R that supports 40x write...
3 CD-R's later,
I discovered that if you are trying to use 8X write CD-R in a burner drive that doesn't go slower than 16x, you will have 3 CD-R coasters. The included Windows software doesn't allow the user to specify write speed... but the free program IMGBurn for windows does support user selectable write speeds...
This is when I discovered, that on my drive, if you select 8X write for CD-R with IMG burn, it may not work if your drive only supports 16x,24x,32x etc write speeds... The media is not good enough to support any of these higher write speeds. This is probably why I have half a spindle worth of these CD-R's... Luckily, I had a near full brick of CD-R's that support 40x write speeds.
Learning Moment #2
As cool as it might be to try to get an old computer (circa 2007) to boot from a USB flash key, it may not work, especially on business branded machines (HP in my case, but possibly Dell, Compaq, Gateway hardware)... There are some people that just can't get it to work, and the PLOP software was last updated in 2013, so it's not exactly an active project... nor are there hoards of people trying to resurrect 10+yr old hardware....
If you are going to burn a CD to put in your optical drive to run PLOP, you mind as well just put the ISO image on a bootable CD-R... This is what I ended up doing as the latest version of the install ISO was under 500MB and fit easily on a CD-R...
The install time from CD-R on my machine was under 15 minutes, and involved me answering a handful of questions about my location, keyboard preference, and which LAN adapter I wanted to use... It ID'd both the onboard and the Dlink I had just purchased... You will also want the machine connected to the internet as I believe it retrieved more files from a mirror site.
----
After I got OMV installed, I was able to mount the 500GB HDD onto the NAS via the web client without wiping it, and after sharing it to my network, I was able to run some speed tests...
Here are the preliminary results.
1.43GB test folder from my 'new' gaming rig (Ryzen 5 2600, SATA III SSD) to OMV server, according to Windows, the files wrote at about 30MB/s
1.43GB test folder from same computer to my old DNS-323 NAS was about 10MB/s
1.43GB test folder from same computer to our 'family desktop' (i3-4150 writing to an attached WD USB3.0 external HDD) was over 40MB/s.
There clearly is a bottle neck somewhere... I'm going to try to figure out where, and if it's worth it to try to fix it... Unfortunately, I think it may be my PCI-gigabit adapter... I could not get speedtests as high on it as my other computers.... I will checkout the Intel brand adapter if I can return the Dlink one...
?? PCI bus - looking a pictures, it is a 32bit slot vs a 64bit slot.
SATA I on the Motherboard? - these should still output 1.5Gbps, which is higher than what the network card should be able to carry.
-----
Learning moment #3
Installing Nextcloud via Docker doesn't go well if you have a drive mounted that is formatted to NTFS... I believe the permissions are not compatible... (My 500GB drive is mounted, but not wiped, as I want to save the data on there *just in case* it's not backed up somewhere else...) It was formatted as NTFS...
I am guessing for the permissions to work, you need it formatted to ext4. (don't know what that means)
Nextcloud states I have an error and need permissions changed to 0770....
--- hopefully it goes better when I have the brand new drives installed...
Labels: NAS, OMV
