Part 3 of building the DAS storage. I repaired the workstation and got the direct attached storage (DAS) connected. 8*4TB SAS drives configured for now as a BTRFS Raid 1 mirror. Gives me 15TB of usable space. I will do a full parts list soon and also revisit this when I have tested it a bit.
Tag: raid
Part 2: Building Direct Attached Storage
Part two of the creation of the 32TB external direct attached storage (DAS) box. I want to keep the costs down, its a bit homemade. Here I just cover the the assembly, as the motherboard in the computer I was intended to connect it to failed on the same day!
Part 1: Building Direct Attached Storage
I have fourteen 4TB SAS drives, 8 of which I am going to use in a homemade 32TB external direct attached storage (DAS) box. I will be using an old case that I have going spare. To connect it up a bunch of cables I found on eBay. This is part one, the cables.
Homemade DAS – Part1
I am building a direct attached storage (DAS) case that I will attach to my workstation using an external SAS card. External RAID DAS cases for SAS drives are not cheap so homemade it is! So far I have been assembling the parts, I have the drives, case, and lots of wires. I will do a more in depth video of the whole process later. You could use this as part of a NAS if you wanted.
Windows 10 Nvidia nForce RAID Update Troubles
So a resent update caused no end of problems with my Windows 10 machine. It would repeatedly fail to install the update, and then when it managed it I couldn’t log into the machine. User profile not accessible. I decided that it was probably time to re-install my machine anyway. However it seems the problem came back. A little different this time.
I reinstalled but chose to leave my Nvidia Soft/Fake RAID partition unchanged as I used it as my user space. The machine re-installed, and everything appeared to be fine. I could get to the RAID array, so I left it as is and went about installing drivers and updates. Updates! This is the problem. It seems I have become one of the many victims of a Windows 10 update that stops Nvidia RAID arrays from working (see here in German). So no sooner had I updated the machine and restarted, the RAID array vanished again. So annoying. This machine is a little old but it is by no means obsolete. Its a dual quad-core opteron with 16GB of ram and a half decent GPU. Plenty of live left in it yet, esp as all I use it for is scanning and printing photographs. The RAID array still reports as healthy at boot. I suppose I should have known not to trust a fake/soft RAID long term. However, wasn’t expecting an update to do it in. So what to do… Buy a cheap RAID card off ebay and use that, turn off Nvidia RAID and use the Windows fake RAID instead? Whatever, they should have warned us of this potential if they knew.