I just installed Xpenology DSM 4.3 onto an HP DL180 G6 with an LSI SAS card, giving me the equivalent of a $3,000 Synology DS3612xs NAS for around $400... though much louder than any store-bought Synology.
My Franken-Synology with 17 drives works just like my Synology DS213j, except MUCH MUCH faster. If anyone is interested, here are the important links:
1) You'll want to read the xpenology forum at www.xpenology.com
2) The basic instructions are here: XPEnology NAS â€Â¢ View topic - Installing XPEnology in PC but that version does not support the LSI SAS cards
3) The updated code with LSI SAS support is here: XPEnology NAS â€Â¢ View topic - Drivers requests / Beta. Download and expand the file from the link named synoboot-3810-pre-v1.1_v4 and ignore everything except synoboot-3810-pre-v1.1_v4.img
The instructions in bullet point #3 above say to copy some .ko files to /lib/modules, but that is not necessary. Simply follow the instructions in bullet point #2, but substitute the .img file from the bullet point #3 download for the .img file downloaded from bullet point #2. That may sound complicated, but it isn't. Basically you use a .img file to create a bootable USB drive, boot your NAS from the key, and then load the rest of the software from the .pat file.
Here is the hardware that I'm using:
1) HP DL180 G6 chassis with the expander backplane (the expander is slow (3Gbit per disk) but OK for a NAS).
2) Single Intel Xeon L5520 CPU - dirt cheap, and more than powerful enough for a NAS. A Xeon L5630 would be even better.
3) 8GB of RAM. Synology doesn't use much memory.
4) LSI 9201-8i SAS/SATA HBA in IT mode.
5) Five SSD drives (one on the motherboard and four attached to the LSI card - all mounted inside of the chassis) plus 12 3.5" SATA drives attached to the expander backplane.
6) A simple USB key for the Synology OS
7) I'll try 10GbE next, since I'm pretty sure that there are no Infiniband drivers in the Synology code. (supported cards: http://www.synology.com/en-global/support/faq/440). The creator of Xpenology, Trantor, has promised to add a driver for the inexpensive Brocade 1020 cards in his next release.
8) If your disks can handle it, consider increasing the resources allocated to RAID expansion and rebuild. See Google for details, for example http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-raid-increase-resync-rebuild-speed.html. I boosted min to 200K and max to 500K and saw much faster volume expansion.
Idle power draw is ~140 watts with 7200 RPM SATA midline drives set not to hibernate, and a 10GbE card installed, compared to the Synology DS3612xs which quotes 132 watts "access" and 57 watts with the drives hibernating, using WD low power drives... which means something between 57 and 132 if they measured power at idle.
Some tips:
1) The HP RAID card didn't work with Xpenology. It's supposed to, so perhaps it was my 9TB RAID disk that the software didn't recognize.
2) The Synology install will fail unless you have at least one SATA drive attached to a SATA motherboard port. My first attempt used only drives attached to the LSI card which, caused the install to abort.
3) The above is for DSM 4.3 3810. Soon enough the links above will become obsolete. See www.xpenology.com for the latest information.
4) On the DL180 G6 with the expander in use, Xpenology can only see disks 9-12. So the eight-disk non expander version of the DL180 might be a better choice. See below for more details.
5) While the Synology assistant works just great, you can instead use the web-based installer. Once you have booted from the USB key, pull up a browser and enter: http://find.synology.com/
6) Not a tip, but some detail: The USB key you create from the .img file contains the Linux kernel and drivers, etc. needed to boot. The .pat file you then install using the Synology assistant contains the Synology code.
7) As an alternative, you can also install VMWare ESXi on the DL180 G6 and then install Synology as a VM. There is a separate download available on www.xpenology.com for the VM version of Xpenology.
Fixing the expander problem
on my dl180 G6 with the expander, Xpenology successfully finds all of the drives, but not all of them show up in the UI. In fact, only four of them do. I was able to make all of the drives appear by following the instructions at http://xpenology.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1361&start=230 . More specifically, I used ssh to edit /etc/syninfo.conf and /etc.defaults/syninfo.conf with the following values:
esataportcfg=”0x0000000”
usbportcfg="0xff00000"
internalportcfg=”0xfffff”
After these changes, all of the drives appear in the UI.
My Franken-Synology with 17 drives works just like my Synology DS213j, except MUCH MUCH faster. If anyone is interested, here are the important links:
1) You'll want to read the xpenology forum at www.xpenology.com
2) The basic instructions are here: XPEnology NAS â€Â¢ View topic - Installing XPEnology in PC but that version does not support the LSI SAS cards
3) The updated code with LSI SAS support is here: XPEnology NAS â€Â¢ View topic - Drivers requests / Beta. Download and expand the file from the link named synoboot-3810-pre-v1.1_v4 and ignore everything except synoboot-3810-pre-v1.1_v4.img
The instructions in bullet point #3 above say to copy some .ko files to /lib/modules, but that is not necessary. Simply follow the instructions in bullet point #2, but substitute the .img file from the bullet point #3 download for the .img file downloaded from bullet point #2. That may sound complicated, but it isn't. Basically you use a .img file to create a bootable USB drive, boot your NAS from the key, and then load the rest of the software from the .pat file.
Here is the hardware that I'm using:
1) HP DL180 G6 chassis with the expander backplane (the expander is slow (3Gbit per disk) but OK for a NAS).
2) Single Intel Xeon L5520 CPU - dirt cheap, and more than powerful enough for a NAS. A Xeon L5630 would be even better.
3) 8GB of RAM. Synology doesn't use much memory.
4) LSI 9201-8i SAS/SATA HBA in IT mode.
5) Five SSD drives (one on the motherboard and four attached to the LSI card - all mounted inside of the chassis) plus 12 3.5" SATA drives attached to the expander backplane.
6) A simple USB key for the Synology OS
7) I'll try 10GbE next, since I'm pretty sure that there are no Infiniband drivers in the Synology code. (supported cards: http://www.synology.com/en-global/support/faq/440). The creator of Xpenology, Trantor, has promised to add a driver for the inexpensive Brocade 1020 cards in his next release.
8) If your disks can handle it, consider increasing the resources allocated to RAID expansion and rebuild. See Google for details, for example http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-raid-increase-resync-rebuild-speed.html. I boosted min to 200K and max to 500K and saw much faster volume expansion.
Idle power draw is ~140 watts with 7200 RPM SATA midline drives set not to hibernate, and a 10GbE card installed, compared to the Synology DS3612xs which quotes 132 watts "access" and 57 watts with the drives hibernating, using WD low power drives... which means something between 57 and 132 if they measured power at idle.
Some tips:
1) The HP RAID card didn't work with Xpenology. It's supposed to, so perhaps it was my 9TB RAID disk that the software didn't recognize.
2) The Synology install will fail unless you have at least one SATA drive attached to a SATA motherboard port. My first attempt used only drives attached to the LSI card which, caused the install to abort.
3) The above is for DSM 4.3 3810. Soon enough the links above will become obsolete. See www.xpenology.com for the latest information.
4) On the DL180 G6 with the expander in use, Xpenology can only see disks 9-12. So the eight-disk non expander version of the DL180 might be a better choice. See below for more details.
5) While the Synology assistant works just great, you can instead use the web-based installer. Once you have booted from the USB key, pull up a browser and enter: http://find.synology.com/
6) Not a tip, but some detail: The USB key you create from the .img file contains the Linux kernel and drivers, etc. needed to boot. The .pat file you then install using the Synology assistant contains the Synology code.
7) As an alternative, you can also install VMWare ESXi on the DL180 G6 and then install Synology as a VM. There is a separate download available on www.xpenology.com for the VM version of Xpenology.
Fixing the expander problem
on my dl180 G6 with the expander, Xpenology successfully finds all of the drives, but not all of them show up in the UI. In fact, only four of them do. I was able to make all of the drives appear by following the instructions at http://xpenology.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1361&start=230 . More specifically, I used ssh to edit /etc/syninfo.conf and /etc.defaults/syninfo.conf with the following values:
esataportcfg=”0x0000000”
usbportcfg="0xff00000"
internalportcfg=”0xfffff”
After these changes, all of the drives appear in the UI.
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