Home NAS Build, UPS Integration

Hardware
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So I started out wanting to build a version of the 8TB machine that Suman posted about awhile back for a home NAS.

Got the Chenbro case (which I’m keeping), and the updated v2 ECS motherboard (though I believe they’re rolling out v3 now), but decided to swap the later for an ASRock C2550D4I, for two reasons:

  1. the ECS MB is a little feature-limited in comparison, most particularly because it doesn’t have support for ECC RAM, for four-pin fan controllers (don’t want the fan running full speed all the time), or the management features of the ASRock.
  2. got the ASRock for a good deal on an open box special (if still a fair bit more than the ECS; if anybody’s looking for a cheap MB that works well with Rockstor, let me know; I’ll be posting on eBay otherwise)

I have 8GB of ECC RAM installed, and four 3 TB WD Reds, configured as a RAID 10.

Everything works fine; I swapped out the MB without reinstalling Rockstor, and it mostly worked (aside from needing to get Rockstor to understand a pool layout because of changing drive names).

Added a Cyperpower CP1000PFCLCD UPS, and installed their Linux management tools per here via RPM package; configured to do a graceful shutdown if there’s an extended outage. While it would be nice, in time, for Rockstor to support UPS integration in the UI, as FreeNAS does, this was trivial to setup from the command line.

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I am stealing @phillxnet’s thunder here, but he submitted a pull request a few days ago for UPS support. I am looking forward to merging it in this update cycle itself.

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@bdarcus i have such a mb myself which currently runs FreeNAS and i couldnt test if either FreeNAS or centos/rockstor support the marvel controller, did you test/use them? might buy it again to migrate my main nas from some beefy amd 8core to some more moderate system, but i need 10 ports :smiley:

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I’m using the Intel controllers, so no.

If you have issues with those additional controllers, you could always look into SAS HBA card as documented here? Gives you eight SATA III connections, for about $75 or so.

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yeah sure, but if i switch i want it to be below 20W w/o disks, another hba (and cooling) adds more power consumption :smiley:

yeah before buying i will test this

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This might be helpful, and this last post, which suggests recent firmware and driver updates may have solved problems with the marvell controllers?

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