Damn!

.... and that was the kindest word I have used in recent weeks towards our IT installation.

I had saved some pennies, about €500 in total. And that was a good reason to think a little deeper about our NAS/Home server combination. A new NAS was (and is!) on the wish list for a long time, but yes.... pennies... More or less by chance, I came across sites that specialize in refurbished IT equipment. Just say second-hand stuff that has been sufficiently refurbished for resale. In the end, my choice fell on a QNAP TS-251-8g, a beautiful NAS with space for two HDDs. You can do a lot with it, not just file storage, but also use it as a DLNA server, and run a virtual environment on it, so you can set up an Ubuntu server on it. In short, exactly what I need so that the "old" Home server can go to the trash... So you can place two hard drives in such a NAS... from the set of 4 6TB WD-Reds that I bought in 2015 /2016 for the home server, one still worked really well. My Synology NAS said of a second one that it was getting too many bad spots, especially in the first part of the disk. Disks three and four had been killed before. One together with the then motherboard, and one a while after that. I replaced the latter with a 6TB Toshiba, but after a while, the SynoNAS said that it no longer trusted it either. So essentially I had one reliable HDD left. The budget also allowed the purchase of a refurbished 6TB WD-Red, so I ordered that as well. The old NAS had meanwhile moved to a degraded status, but that is still easy to read.

So the plan was: to install the new (yes, yes.... refurbished is not new, but compared to my Synology DS411j everything is new) NAS, with the new (see the previous clause) HDD, which is then installed as a single disk. Then copy everything from the old NAS, then remove the good disk from it and also put it in the new NAS and allow those two disks to be converted into a RAID-1.

Good plan... but then the reality... The TS251 turned on fine, I could make contact with it from my desktop, and it wanted to update its OS first. Fine. Please wait a while... Then it continued. Would you please install a HDD. I wanted that. Newly purchased WD-Red in and boom! NAS went out and did nothing. Unplugged everything, took out HDD and everything back on. Must have been an accidental power outage. Procedure repeated. The same thing happens again. As soon as you put in the new HDD, the NAS turned off... Is that HDD OK? Test it in a USB-SATA adapter. New HDD doesn't work! Called supplier. "I always test an HDD extra just before it goes out the door, and this one certainly did. It is of course possible that something happened to it during transport." Well, I can start a warranty procedure, with WD or with the supplier, but that always takes time.

Made a new plan. Copied as much as possible from the old NAS to smaller, old HDDs that I still had lying around. Most to a 2 TB WD-Green and my movie collection to a 1 TB WD-Green. That's a pity, that just doesn't fit. 0.3 TB too little space for the movies. But the old WD-Red HDD nr. two with all its bad sectors is not yet unusable: on the second part of it, a separate partition was made and on it the movie collection. In the end, everything is copied. That worked with the use of a USB-SATA adapter and I only had a version that knew USB 2. In short, copying took several days. And then back to the new NAS. That is, first dismantled the old NAS and put it in the shed, with the aim of one day taking it to the municipal landfill. Put the "good" HDD from the old NAS in the new one and start...

PAF!

Now that formerly so good 6TB WD-Red HDD is suddenly broken?!?!?! Try again with the "bad" old HDD, yes there is a backup of my movies on it, but as long as I don't give the new NAS a format command, that's safe...

PAF!

And then came that Damn! and more beautiful words. It wasn't the HDDs that were the problem, but the new NAS. This caused a short circuit on connected HDDs. Called the supplier and he didn't believe it. "The chance that both the NAS and an HDD have been delivered broken is negligible!" "No, in hindsight I don't think that HDD arrived broken, it was also broken by the NAS." "Well, anyway, send it back and I'll let a real expert sort it out!"

I don't feel like whining. In retrospect, I could have claimed my two fallen HDDs, but then you have to come up with hard evidence. I'm certainly not afraid of the "real expert", if only because I sent the stuff back within 14 days after it arrived here. So I was still in my reflection period, or whatever it's called. And my money... Look, I buy things like that through Afterpay as much as possible. As the name says: pay when everything is in house and you are satisfied. I sent Afterpay the message that everything has been returned, and this case is settled.

But how to go on? The headline of this post says it all... There is no budget-friendly NAS on the market, and besides, I have an HDD problem. So my old Home server was restored to its former glory. You need HDDs in there. Challenge... 6TBs are at a price. What if I install 3 x 4TB in RAID5? That gives a theoretical capacity of 8 TB. In addition, 4TBs are currently cheaper per TB than any other large drive. The problem is that my Biostar MoBo only has two SATA ports. Yes, I once bought a PCI-e card with two extra ports, but that gives errors on this MoBo. But maybe it's worth looking into it a bit more. What errors were those? It also plays a role in that when I tested that the first time, the MoBo was not yet fully connected, maybe that makes a difference...

Good news: the SATA PCI-e card does work and even works well. But... it interferes with the operation of the ethernet port or vice versa. But that is solvable. There was room in the budget for the purchase of 3 pieces of 4TB WD-Blues (which is not NAS quality, but the Home Server is turned off for more than half of the day anyway) and also for a USB 3.0 to Ethernet adapter. So I don't use the Ethernet port of the MoBo at all. And I have the three HDDs running in Raid-5, two of which via the PCI-e card. Runs just fine!

Nice detail: I didn't feel like waiting days before everything was copied. My MoBo now has 4 SATA ports in total. One of them was in use with a 250G SSD. I disconnected that. On each HDD I defined a partition of 75G. HDD1 now has Ubuntu 20:04 on it. The backup partition will be on HDD2. And on HDD3 I use this space as a (a bit too big) swap partition. I did that because then the free space on each HDD is the same. And they don't run in Raid-5 now, but in Raid-Z1, or the ZFS variant of Raid-5. Hip hay! And so I kept a SATA port free, where I can attach a drive to copy from or to at SATA speeds. And my server cabinet has the option to use a swappable position. So if I feel like it again...

Of course, I feel like it! First of all I tried to read something from my "old", bad" 6TB HDD-Red. As soon as I slid it into the server, the cabinet stopped. Everything was just out. So I removed the HDD. Switched the Server cabinet off. Waited a few minutes and turned the server switch back on, and luckily... Everything works again. But those HDDs are really destroyed by the disaster NAS.

In retrospect, this adventure has cost me a lot of time and annoyance, especially two HDDs. As a result, I couldn't put everything back. My film collection in particular is less complete than before, but so be it. It was a good lesson and an exciting adventure and my IT closet is a bit emptier than before... the Synology DS-411J that has provided good services since 2011 is now definitely written off both economically and technically.

But there's something else in that closet now... a monitor! I had also found space in my conversion budget for a new monitor for the Desktop. The thing that was there was really too small for intensive use. And where the NAS failed, it worked fine with the monitor: also refurbished, but now a 24-inch with, and that is the most important, 1920 x 1018 pixels. Works a lot better. And the old one, with 1366 x 768 dots, is now upstairs near the server, so that I only have to go up the stairs with a keyboard if something needs to be done there.