I’ve been using Seagate IronWolf disks for a few years now and currently have about 20 in service, most of those are the 10TB (and 12TB) Non-Pro (ST10000VN0004) variety. Most of my experience with them has been great so when the new server build came along I bought a few more to run as my main ZFS pool. Sadly, things didn’t go exactly as planned, but I think I was also able to fix it, so let’s see what happened!
Continue reading Seagate IronWolf 10TB Firmware Fix (CRC errors with ZFS)
Now that we have some backups made, let’s run a restore and discuss some tips and tricks!
Continue reading DIY cloud backup: How to perform a Duplicati Restore and Tips and Tricks
In the previous article I showed you how to install and configure the server and storage. So now that we have a storage target running for a tenant, let’s install the Duplicati 2 client software and configure a backup!
Continue reading DIY Cloud Backup: Installing and configuring a client
Now that we have all the hardware (Server, USB3 disk cabinet and disks) we need to set it all up! This post will guide you through installing Ubuntu, setting up the storage and configuring the Minio S3 backend including how to deal with multiple tenants.
Continue reading DIY cloud backup: Installing and configuring the server
Ok, so now we have all the hardware selected, let’s talk OS and storage configurations, a lot of it comes down to personal preference and hardware you want/need to buy!
Continue reading DIY cloud backup: OS and Storage configuration
To build our DIY multi-tenant, multi-client “cloud” backup solution we’re going to need a “server” and storage. I use the term server loosely because this is anything but serve grade hardware. But since it serves the purpose of holding home backups and nothing else, it also needs to be cost effective. I believe I have found the right middle-ground in that, creating a “fast enough” setup which is also cheap enough to run.
Continue reading DIY cloud backup: Server and storage hardware
Over the past few weeks I’ve been running a lot of AMD Ryzen benchmarks. This time we’re taking a look at the Ryzen processor in combination with the X370 chipset and see how well it does with storage tasks!
Continue reading RoadtoRyzen: AMD Ryzen AM4 X370 Storage benchmarks
Don’t have enough ports available in your (Storage/ESXi) server? Even though modern motherboards come with 6 onboard port now a days, maybe it’s not enough for you. Or you are using a little bit older hardware and don’t have enough 6G ports (Only important to SSD’s really). A quick and easy way is adding a PCIe based storage controller. And while True Hardware RAID can be good to have, on lower end controllers it’s often more of a hindrance then a benefit. Especially when using something life software RAID or ZFS.
This guide will show you how to flash an LSI 9211-8i or 9220-8i / Dell Perc H310 / IBM M1015 to LSI IT firmware. IT stands for “Intergrated Target”. This way the disks get presented to the OS is a raw form, much like your motherboard ports would do. This enables complete control, SMART data for your OS and Power Management such as spindown. It will also help you if you encounter the “Failed to initialize PAL” error while flashing.
I have been building private servers for over 12 years now, as written before my current server is incarnation/version 8 with several even having minor revision numbers between the big numbers. During this time I have accumulated some best practices for myself and one of them is to always perform a full surface scan on (new) disks I receive. Read more about it in this article!
Continue reading Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1.1 – x: HDD Preperations
This third part will be a hardware and design overview of the Storage server that I am using. This server combines a NAS with some secondary functions for me such as SabNZBd, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, FTP, CrashPlan, etc. I know that kind of taints it’s pure function (serve me storage) but since I used a pretty hefty machine for it, all seems to be working quite well and since this is not a company installation I believe the otherwise wasted CPU power can be put to good use! This article will be one of the most complex because it will hold the configuration I made and also partially the reasons why.
