Hi everyone,
I present you briefly my installation, and what i did to make it work better.
I used for a long time a Netgear readynas ultra 4 (single core atom cpu), tweaked to 2GB RAM.
When a corrupted OS partition (4GB raid 1 partition) bricked my nas last year (hopefully restored via Telnet access), it was time that i implement better hardware and software.
As the HP gen8 microserver are more expensive used than they were new, i stumbled on a Acer AC100 (similar to a gen8 microserver, but with sandy bridge architecture, and no usb3) at 110€ with 2*2TB drives.
And here comes the things that didn't work well :
- 1 drive wasn't available, the seller proposed to replace it with 3 1TB drive, i accepted.
- upon receiving the nas, the 3 1TB drive couldn't fully enter the rack. I discovered at that moment that the disks are SAS drives and not SATA => i have 3 more paperweights
- the default cpu was a pentium G645 (with 65W tdp). As used xeon low power doens't cost much nowadays, i wanted to install a Xeon E3-1225L => didn't work
- i guessed the motherboard didn't support ivy bridge cpu (even though the intel C206 chipset is compatible), i then tried with a Xeon E3-1220L (sandy bridge) => didn't work either
- even after customizing the bios to add the microcode, it didn't work.
I then realized Acer only wanted to accept the cpu it provided with the server, and hopefully, the Xeon E3-1260L was one of them, and it works like a charm now
Next step was the RAM : i got 2*4GB ECC to replace the 2GB stock RAM (2*8GB was tempting but the price was a lot more).
In the next post, i'll detail what i did to try to improve the array capacity, and what worked finally.
After that, i got a 4 bays microserver with plenty of power, a 35W idle power consumption, running OMV5 on a 64GB USB stick.