Installing Rockstor for first time

Installation
1

Hello.

I’m a Rockstor / selfbuild NAS newbie.

My only experiences with NAS’es comes from owning a Readynas NV+ and a Readynas RND104.
Both of these have been OK, but the NV+ is starting to be unstable, and the RND104 has given me some trouble.

So I have decided to replace these two NAS’es with one selfbuild. My only experiences is with a small test setup of FreeNas, which worked well, but I find the expandability options limited. And it demands insane amounts of memory, even though I have enough of that.

My setup will be a ASUS M3A78-CM, with a Phenom X4 940. 10 Gb mem.

Rockstor will probably boot from USB, so I have the 6 Sata channels available for HDD’s.

My plan was to buy 3 brand new 2TB discs, set them up to run in RAID5. Move data from my RND104, to the new NAS, take 3 2TB discs from the RND104, add them to the Rockstor NAS, expand the volume, and then copy the data from the NV+ to the new NAS.

As far as I have understood, it should be possible to do this, and maintain the Raid5 level of protection all the way through this?

Have I understood things correctly?

Hope you understand what my plans are, and hope its doable :smile:

What about future expandability, could I upgrade to 4TB discs later on, and stil maintain redundancy?

2

Hi Karsten,

First off, welcome to Rockstor community. Look around and you’ll find some useful information and feel free to share your knowledge and ask questions.

Rockstor will boot from USB. But I see that this mobo doesn’t have usb 3.0. So things will be slow. Some optimizations are coming in 3.8-3 update which will help. If performance becomes a major concern, you might want to consider something faster via PCIe, but I digress. If you do want to go this route, let me know.

Regarding your expansion plans, your assumptions are correct. But please be aware of the current status of RAID5/6 maturity. @Tom summarized it very well here: Question about RAID5/6 stability

3

Thanks for your reply.

I have read that it would be slow, but I’ll test it out to see if I can live with it.

My experiences are that you can get reasonable performance from a USB3 stick in an USB2 slot. At least you can saturate the USB2 read speeds :smiley:
I’ll try it and see how it goes.

Good to see that my planned upgrade path is feasible.

Right now I’m running a test install on an USB3 stick in a USB slot on my main computer and seems to work OK. Only thing is upgrades seem to take forever. Don’t know how much time its supposed to take, but the 5 minute upgrade timeout is not enough.
I’ll try to be patient and see how it goes.

4

Would you have any recommendations regarding what I could use in the PCIe slot?

5

@KarstenV, another forum member @sirhcjw recently had success with a PCI-E to mSATA adapter, see their comments over at:- Recovery from failed system drive or usb stick

6

Thanks.

I have looked at the items, and decided to try them out. So I have ordered one of each, and hope to have the same success as the original poster.

7

I am testing them myself. So far so good. I am thinking about offering these kind of accessories on the Rockstor Shop. Would that be of interest to folks?

8

I think it could be interesting.

If good products were offered, with good clear explanations to what and when they could be used, I cant see a reason why they shouldnt sell.

If it was a recommended setup, and I don’t see anything wrong with recommending hardware you know works with your software, and it gave good reliable performance, I actually think it could be a good idea, and could help peoble out with setting up a good system.

The products would have to be broadly compatible so that they would work on both new and older hardware, as many peoble probably do the same as me, and setup an old PC to be a NAS server.

1 Like
9

Hey All,

I am glad to see my research has been of value to others. I am very happy with the performance of the pcie + msata card and the bonus is it also gives you an extra sata 3 port.

Cheers

Chris