Tag Archives: RAID

Seagate IronWolf 10TB Firmware Fix (CRC errors with ZFS)

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!

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DIY cloud backup: Installing and configuring the server

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.

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DIY cloud backup: Server and storage hardware

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.

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Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1.2 – x: Flashing an LSI 9211-8i/9220-8i / Dell Perc H310 / IBM M1015 to LSI IT firmware

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.


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Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1.1 – x: HDD Preperations

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!

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Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 3 – x: ZFSguru Hardware and Layout (ZFS using FreeBSD)

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.

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