Ok, So I was bored and curious if I could get Rockstor to install on my old QNAP TS-251+. Spec wise its got a Celeron J1900 2GHz Quad Core and had already been upgraded to 8GB of memory, has dual 1GB NICS and 2 drive bays.
The Qnap would only boot from 1 of the USB ports, install went smooth after finding the 1 that it would boot from. Found that the internal storage that came with it was only a 500Mb eUSB SSD, so that had to go to install Rockstor. The 500Mb eUSB SSD plugs into a system board USB header, I swapped it out with a USB header cable, then plugged it into an Intel SSD with a Micro-B USD to SATA adapter from an external USB drive. I had to clearance the drive cage to clear the USB cable as it is taller than the eUSB drive was. You can buy larger eUSB SSD’s but not knowing if Rockstor would even run on the QNAP I wasnt about to drop $$$ for a 8GB eUSB just to find out, so I used what I had on hand.
Original eUSB from QNAP
Micro-B to SATA
USB Header cable is taller than original eUSB
I installed 2 x 4TB Western Digital RE drives and it is working great, I did have to clear the file system off them via console (wipefs /dev/sdx) before Rockstor would let me do anything with them, they both had “mdraid member waiting for UI” error.
I was very pleased to find that file transfers from my PC’s NVMe to the QNAP Rockstor averaged around 650Mbps and would fully saturate the 1Gb NIC on the QNAP on large files.
Its currently a mess of wires on my desk but now that I know it works I will get a shorter USB cable so I can mount the SSD inside the case. And button it all back up.
All in all a fun evening of modding 