Gimli, a NAS build by Shaqalac.

[Mansel]

awesome  :wub:

[Raboo]

Very nice I want one

[AndyCapets]

Love it! And the SFX PSU is soooo tiny, it's incredible

[flibberdipper]

Nice.

[Homicidium]

Beautilful build! I never now what to do with all that storage, haha 

[Shaqalac]

awesome  :wub:

Well I completely agree with you, he is a beauty.  :wub:

 

Very nice I want one

You kind of have to see the case in person, you'll be amazed of how well and solid it's built.

 

Love it! And the SFX PSU is soooo tiny, it's incredible

It's incredible that SilverStone packed 450 80+ Gold watts into such a small form factor.

The Lian-Li does support an ATX PSU up to 180mm long but you must be insane to buy a PSU that big. There's no way I would work with that.

 

Beautilful build! I never now what to do with all that storage, haha 

1080p Remux movies, Tv shows, music and pictures

[WiiManic]

Looks amazing, and so much storage and potential for more in such a small footprint.

 

Been great seeing the case and it being filled up

[MG2R]

Again, my apologies for not receiving the tags... I've read through the build log. I hope I didn't miss too much. It's late over here...

 

 

So I spent the weekend at a friend of mine, the friend that actually got me started with the idea of getting a NAS, and he has recently bought a Synology DS412+, a beautiful little machine. So a think I'm a bit concerned about is the noise level of my NAS when it's complete as it will stand 2m away from my bed as it is right now and probably not a lot further away when I get my own apartment. The DS412+ was surprisingly quiet and the only thing you could really hear was the drives spinning, impressive! It got me thinking though, could you reduce that noise level even more? My initial thoughs was to use the low-noise adapter with my NF-F12 and NF-A14 and/or to replace the NF-F12 with a Noctua NF-S12A. Another modification that could decrease the noise level could be noise dampening foam like be quiet!'s Noise absorber kit or Silverstone's SF01. Do any of you have any experience with these two products and be able to tell me if it would do any difference at all.

My server has a big-ass NH-D14 cooling a low-end Celeron and an NF-F12 modded into the PSU. The fans spin so slow that they're inaudible. The only noise emitted from the system is made by the hard drives. If the system is for your personal use only, you could set up a batch script that checks if the IP-address of your main rig is responding to pings and that turns on or off the drives accordingly. I used to do that so my room is silent at night I think I still have the script somewhere

 

RAID config?

As you can see in previous post I've bought 4 x 4TB drives to begin with. The Q25B is able to hold up to 7 x 3.5" drives without any modification. I'm planning to add the last 3 drives when I'll run out of storage, which hopefully will take some time. With 4 drives only it seems like an obvious choice to go for a RAID5 config, which will give you 12TB of usable storage but when you add another 3 drives of 4TB that gives you 24TB of usable storage but only tolerant of 1 drive to fail! That to me is a bit scary, that's why I'm thinking of going with a RAID6 config. That's might seem a bit silly at first with only 4 x 4TB drives, which gives me 8TB of usable storage but once I start to add more drives to the array it will start to make some sense. With adding an additional 4TB drive will give me 4TB additional usable storage and a failure tolerance of 2 drives.

I'd still go for RAID5. But that's just me, I like to live dangerously

 

 

NOTE
This does of course not take into account the power needed for spinning up
the drives, which can be quite a bit more, but I couldn't find any reliable
specs on that, plus that could be mitigated by staggered spin-ups AFAIK.

Electric motors consume up to 7 times their rated working amperage during spinup, due to the back-EMF not being established yet..

As you said, all recent hardware should employ a staggered spinup, so that takes care of any overcurrent issues in your cables

 

No idea what this is but I'm interested if anyone could tell me. Looks swapable with the two diagonal plastic mounting clips.

To the right you can some of the mini PCI e, most likely for the WI-FI module.

That's what used to be called the south bridge, I think.

 

I don't know about FreeNAS but with mdadm I should be able to do that. Not sure of how difficult it is.

From the wiki on mdadm it doesn't look like it.

Growing an array in mdadm is easy. Have done it myself. The only thing you need to pray for is that the power doesn't go out while the array is growing.

 

So I noticed a difference with the drives. They're all from the same batch. Can anyone explain what the pink glue is and if it's supposed to be there and why does only two of the four drives have it?

The drives slide right in and they will not go anywhere. I was a bit sceptical about this locking mechanism that I was afraid the drives would be able to move back and forth just a little bit. That is not the case, the drives have to align perfectly for the slide to go down.

1. I'm guessing that glue is used to insulate the contacts. Weird that it's only on one of the drives, though...
2. Is there a particular reason you didn't place that top hard drive in the bottom slot? It could get better cooling if you do...

[Shaqalac]

Looks amazing, and so much storage and potential for more in such a small footprint.

 

Been great seeing the case and it being filled up

Yup, that fact that I have 16TB of storage in there is amazing and what's even more amazing is that I'll be able to add another 12TB at least

 

There is just something very beautiful about a bunch of HDDs next to each other.

 

Again, my apologies for not receiving the tags... I've read through the build log. I hope I didn't miss too much. It's late over here...

No worries, I'm just glad you received it in the end.

 

My server has a big-ass NH-D14 cooling a low-end Celeron and an NF-F12 modded into the PSU. The fans spin so slow that they're inaudible. The only noise emitted from the system is made by the hard drives. If the system is for your personal use only, you could set up a batch script that checks if the IP-address of your main rig is responding to pings and that turns on or off the drives accordingly. I used to do that so my room is silent at night I think I still have the script somewhere.

I'll have to play around with the fan speed of the NF-F12, NF-A14 and NH-L9i. The tricky thing as it is right now with the setup I have, is that the NF-F12 and NF-A14 are connected to the same PWM header, so they'll run at the same speed. Only some testing will show this but I think I need to run the NF-A14 at a bit higher rpm than the NF-F12 to keep the drives nice and cool.

That script doesn't sound like a bad idea. I have been thinking about to set up some kind of time schedule, so it will shut down during night times and fire up in the morning as well as fire up µtorrent while I'm in school. If you find that script please let me know.

 

I'd still go for RAID5. But that's just me, I like to live dangerously

It is very tempting as a RAID6 with 4 x 4TB drives "only" gives you 8TB of usable storage.

I do think RAID6 is the better solution for me, or at least it will make me feel more secure.

 

Growing an array in mdadm is easy. Have done it myself. The only thing you need to pray for is that the power doesn't go out while the array is growing.

It will be the most terrifying hours.

 

1. I'm guessing that glue is used to insulate the contacts. Weird that it's only on one of the drives, though...
2. Is there a particular reason you didn't place that top hard drive in the bottom slot? It could get better cooling if you do...

1. Do you think the drives without the insulation will be a problem. I haven't fired up the machine yet so it shouldn't be a problem to get them replaced. Also when I've spent so much money on drives alone I don't want them to fail within a short period of time.
2. I guess it's my OCD kicking in. I don't know why I did it, I think it's for future purposes so it will be more easy to locate drive #1 or drive #3. Also right now I can manage to connect all four drives to the system with one SAS to SATA data cable. Lets say I had the four drives in the bottom slots and still used one cable. If I were to add another drive in the top and in the bottom the SAS to SATA data cable would have to go across the case if it's even long enough. I don't know if that made any sense or if it matters.

[MG2R]

If you find that script please let me know.

Found it... It's old, probably not completely correct and it could be way more efficient, but it works and serves its purpose. This version is for checking two machines (my desktop and my laptop. It requires `hdparm`to work and will put the drives in standby once it can't ping any of the two machines. The standby mode is such that the drives will powerd down after a certain amount of idle time. This is done, so that you can still use them from another machine (they will spin up automatically on I/O access) and they'll power down again once not in use. The moment either one of the IP's becomes available again, the script will wake up the drives and disable standby, to limit the number of power cycles.

 

It's important to fine tune and read up on the required idle time. The settings in this file worked for me, but your mileage may vary. Try to figure out what idle time is long enough to not make the drives power down when you're watching a movie (for example) and short enough to not make them spin for too long after they're not in use anymore. I hereby grant permission to anyone to use the script at your heart's content, as long as you're not making money of it

 

 

The script needs to be run as root (hdparm requirement) and can be put in root's crontab to launch it at startup.

 

Not sure if it's absolutely necessary, but it might be a good idea to do `touch /var/log/ping.log` (or whatever file you decide to use as logfile) before running the script for the first time.

 

Also, if you're planning on using Bittorrent Sync, forget about this script. Unless you also turn of BT Sync when you make the drives power down, BT Sync will keep the drives spinning nomatter what. That's why I haven't used this script in a while now.

 

1. Do you think the drives without the insulation will be a problem. I haven't fired up the machine yet so it shouldn't be a problem to get them replaced. Also when I've spent so much money on drives alone I don't want them to fail within a short period of time.
2. I guess it's my OCD kicking in. I don't know why I did it, I think it's for future purposes so it will be more easy to locate drive #1 or drive #3. Also right now I can manage to connect all four drives to the system with one SAS to SATA data cable. Lets say I had the four drives in the bottom slots and still used one cable. If I were to add another drive in the top and in the bottom the SAS to SATA data cable would have to go across the case if it's even long enough. I don't know if that made any sense or if it matters.

 

1. If no conductor shorts out the contacts, you should be fine
2. Makes perfect sense then

#!/bin/bash############################################### Name          : ping.sh## Version       : 1.1## Date          : 2012-10-02## Author        : MG2R## Compatibility : Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS## Purpose       : Toggle drives on/offline based on status of IP.## Run Frequency : Continuous## Exit Codes    : None## Forum         : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2065600################ CHANGE LOG ################### DATE       WHO  WHAT WAS CHANGED## ---------- ---- ----------------------------## 2012-10-02 MG2R Created script.## 2012-10-02 LTH  Minor updates to work via sudo or crontab.## 2013-04-12 MG2R Improved logging#############################################Logfile="/var/log/ping.log"Machine1="192.168.0.151"Machine2="192.168.0.152"Enabled=2sleep 1mecho "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` [INFO] Script started." | tee -a ${Logfile}while truedo  ping -c 1 ${Machine1} > /dev/null 2>&1 || ping -c 1 ${Machine2} > /dev/null 2>&1  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then    ## Machine is online.    if [ ${Enabled} -ne 0 ]; then      ## Turn on the drives.      hdparm -S 0 /dev/sd[b-d] &&\      echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` RAID stand-by disabled" | \      tee -a ${Logfile} ||\      echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` Disabling stand-by FAILED" |\      tee -a ${Logfile}    fi    Enabled=0  else    ## Machine is offline.    if [ ${Enabled} -ne 1 ]; then      ## Turn off the drives.      hdparm -S 2 /dev/sd[b-d] &&\      echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` RAID stand-by enabled" | \      tee -a ${Logfile} ||\      echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` Enabling stand-by FAILED" |\      tee -a ${Logfile}    fi    Enabled=1  fi  sleep 1mdone

[Shaqalac]

 

Found it... It's old, probably not completely correct and it could be way more efficient, but it works and serves its purpose. This version is for checking two machines (my desktop and my laptop. It requires `hdparm`to work and will put the drives in standby once it can't ping any of the two machines. The standby mode is such that the drives will powerd down after a certain amount of idle time. This is done, so that you can still use them from another machine (they will spin up automatically on I/O access) and they'll power down again once not in use. The moment either one of the IP's becomes available again, the script will wake up the drives and disable standby, to limit the number of power cycles.

 

It's important to fine tune and read up on the required idle time. The settings in this file worked for me, but your mileage may vary. Try to figure out what idle time is long enough to not make the drives power down when you're watching a movie (for example) and short enough to not make them spin for too long after they're not in use anymore. I hereby grant permission to anyone to use the script at your heart's content, as long as you're not making money of it

 

 

The script needs to be run as root (hdparm requirement) and can be put in root's crontab to launch it at startup.

 

Not sure if it's absolutely necessary, but it might be a good idea to do `touch /var/log/ping.log` (or whatever file you decide to use as logfile) before running the script for the first time.

As this will be my first experience with Debian or Linux in general it looks like this will be something I will try after I've learned all the basics.

 

 

1. If no conductor shorts out the contacts, you should be fine

I guess and with the way my drives are mounted is should be impossible for a conductor to short out the contacts.

When I expand the array and mount drives in the bottom I might want to make sure that the contacts are isolated.

#!/bin/bash############################################### Name          : ping.sh## Version       : 1.1## Date          : 2012-10-02## Author        : MG2R## Compatibility : Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS## Purpose       : Toggle drives on/offline based on status of IP.## Run Frequency : Continuous## Exit Codes    : None## Forum         : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2065600################ CHANGE LOG ################### DATE       WHO  WHAT WAS CHANGED## ---------- ---- ----------------------------## 2012-10-02 MG2R Created script.## 2012-10-02 LTH  Minor updates to work via sudo or crontab.## 2013-04-12 MG2R Improved logging#############################################Logfile="/var/log/ping.log"Machine1="192.168.0.151"Machine2="192.168.0.152"Enabled=2sleep 1mecho "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` [INFO] Script started." | tee -a ${Logfile}while truedo  ping -c 1 ${Machine1} > /dev/null 2>&1 || ping -c 1 ${Machine2} > /dev/null 2>&1  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then    ## Machine is online.    if [ ${Enabled} -ne 0 ]; then      ## Turn on the drives.      hdparm -S 0 /dev/sd[b-d] &&\      echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` RAID stand-by disabled" | \      tee -a ${Logfile} ||\      echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` Disabling stand-by FAILED" |\      tee -a ${Logfile}    fi    Enabled=0  else    ## Machine is offline.    if [ ${Enabled} -ne 1 ]; then      ## Turn off the drives.      hdparm -S 2 /dev/sd[b-d] &&\      echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` RAID stand-by enabled" | \      tee -a ${Logfile} ||\      echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H:%M:%S` Enabling stand-by FAILED" |\      tee -a ${Logfile}    fi    Enabled=1  fi  sleep 1mdone

[MG2R]

As this will be my first experience with Debian or Linux in general it looks like this will be something I will try after I've learned all the basics.

Questions are always welcome, just take it slow and you'll get there

 

 

When I expand the array and mount drives in the bottom I might want to make sure that the contacts are isolated.

It'll be fine

[Shaqalac]

Questions are always welcome, just take it slow and you'll get there

I appreciate that but indeed, I'm expecting a learning curve, maybe a steep one.

[MG2R]

maybe a steep one.

Depends... With the right tutorials it can be fairly easy. If you do end up using my tutorial, please do consider leaving some form of feedback (especially about the 'Linux Basics' section). I wrote that tutorial to be newbie friendly, so I'd like to know if it actually is, or if I still need to work on it.

[Shaqalac]

Depends... With the right tutorials it can be fairly easy. If you do end up using my tutorial, please do consider leaving some form of feedback (especially about the 'Linux Basics' section). I wrote that tutorial to be newbie friendly, so I'd like to know if it actually is, or if I still need to work on it.

Like mentioned earlier a couple of time I'll most likely end up using you guide for a few different reasons. First, it looks noob friendly, I've skimmed it a couple of times and it doesn't look and second, if I get stuck I have someone to contact (you and the rest of the forum).

 

I'll make sure to take notes when I use the guide for improvement suggestions and if I think there should be something added.

[Shaqalac]

Finally downloaded Debian and is ready to rock. Well. Almost.

 

Last Monday I got an email saying that my USB stick had been shipped and it should arrive within a couple of days. Today, one week later, I still haven't received the USB stick, it turns out to be lost in mail and the retailer and the Danish postal service have to sort out the replacement.

 

That means I most likely wont be able to install Debian on the server and start setting it up. On the other hand I'll use some time to look for sleeving gear and what colour scheme I should run. Any suggestions?

[Shaqalac]

Update #11: Debian, one of the longest installations and a settlement on the sleeving.

 

It's been a while since the last update but I have basically been waiting for the OS drive to arrive. It's finally here and installed, so far it works flawless but only time will tell if it isn't capable of the task. This update will be a little different as I'm pretty much done as far as hardware goes, hopefully I'll be able to provide you with some first time sleeving job in the very near future. Hope you enjoy this one though and please leave some feedback whether you liked this or if you just want to see hardware?

 

Lets start with the sleeving as there's not so much to say about it.

I've been thinking back and forth whether I should go for all black single sleeved cables or with a touch of Vanilla Sands N.17 and Copper-Brown or just with a touch of Copper-Brown. As for the rest of the case I want an overall clean and calm look and I don't think a combination of black, Vanilla Sands N.17 and Copper-Brown will achieve that, I think it'll be too distracting for the eye. I'm still not completely sure whether I want to have a couple of cables with Copper-Brown sleeving, so I'll most likely order enough sleeving to make all black cables and 10m of Copper-Brown in case I want it.

 

What pattern will I make?

All black is self explanatory.

 

Black and Copper-Brown.

With this combination I will only be concentrating about the 24-pin and SATA power cables. The reason for this is that I think it'll look weird with a stripe of Copper-Brown on the 4-pin connector as it will be placed in one of the corners like so:

 

C-B

B-B

 

So this is how I will do the 24-pin and SATA power cables.

 

24-pin (how it could look):

B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-C-C-B-B

B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B

 

SATA Power:

B-B-B-C-B

 

I have to figure out if I can make the SFF-8087 custom length or I can find something on eBay/Amazon with 90-degree headers as well with a better fit length than the ones I have.

 

I tried to calculate on how much sleeving I reckon I'd use/need.

 

Now back to Debian and an explanation to the title of this update.

First of all my SanDisk Cruzer got lost in mail, which added a couple of days in terms of delivery time as the company had to sent me a new one with a private shipping company.

So I tried to prepare as much as possible by sorting out the USB boot drive.

 

So the SanDisk Cruzer Fit finally arrived. Another lighter comparison. It is absolutely amazing that SanDisk were able to pack 16GB of storage in something that's almost the size as the connector itself, there's just a bit of plastic so you're able to drag the stick out again from the computer.

 

This picture shows why I chose the SanDisk Cruzer Fit, it's very low profile which means you wont knock it off by an accident. Another thing I didn't know about the drive is that it is actually stuck to the motherboard really good, it takes a good amount of force to take it out. 

 

My humble workstations for the installation. An old Acer VGA monitor, a SteelSeries 6gv2 and a box as a table.

 

The system is fired up for the very first time, never got around to make a test run before I put the system in the Q25B, which later on turned out to be a minor mistake. Back to my point, as I fired it up for the first time I was in for a very nasty surprise. Look at that LED, it is awful, I'm wondering what the creators of this case were thinking when they had put such a great case together and then chose to ruin it by adding a stupid blue LED for the power button. Luckily this should be fixed by disconnecting the connector from the motherboard. I'm still stunned that they add that LED though.

 

First sign of life, it's detecting my IBM ServeRAID M1015.

 

This was the first time I've been working with a UEFI BIOS, looks great but I actually think I prefer the standard (legacy) BIOS.

 

At first I was trying and my intentions was to install Debian from a 4GB Kingston USB drive from debian-7.4.0-amd64-netinst. This is the beginning of my problems. I have no picture of the main tab (ALT + F1) but when the installer is scanning for disks it got stuck at 50%. From the picture you can see the installer couldn't find any volumes even though the SanDisk was visible in the BIOS. I tried numerous different things to get past the 50% stuck, let me list as many as I can remember.

• Reformat the SanDisk drive.
• Clear CMOS.
• Connect the USB drives (OS drive and boot drive) to different ports, one drive at a time.
• Only connect the boot drive. 

None of these possible solutions worked and besides from the problem of being stuck at 50% I ran in to another problem, a rather annoying one.

 

As I had to troubleshoot why it wouldn't go past the 50% in the installation I had to reinstall the system a few times, no problems there. Well, suddenly no picture appeared on the screen even though the fans were spinning, LEDs on the LSI RAID controller were on (the system was on). My first attempt to solve this problem was to swap out the monitor but obviously that didn't solved the problem. I kept rebooting the system to get a picture on the screen but nothing happened, sometimes the system would reboot itself (fans stopped spinning for a brief second and then powered on again). 

This really made my day, now I had to problems to troubleshoot at the same time, yay. I kept rebooting the system until I got this on the screen, it looked like this for 20min before it continued. It displayed some text for a very short time but I only saw something about the RAID controller. After a google search it showed that others had a similar problem. Apparently it has something to do with the RAID controller not being flashed.

 

The simple temporary solution to that problem. I'll have to deal with that later on, my first priority was to get Debian installed.

 

My ghetto ass solution!

This will need some explanation. My SilverStone PSU only have 3 SATA power connector which all of them is already connected to the hot swap cage so I couldn't be bothered with taking that apart. My main rig have a lot of spares, so it's basically acting power station for my ODD. Then the ODD is then connected to the NAS and, yeah, I had to elevate my main rig because the cables aren't long enough.

I ditched the netinst. and downloaded a full image instead.

Success, Debian 7.4.0 is now installed.

 

As I final note I want to say that for the installation I was using MG2R's guide; Howto: create your own linux home server using Debian, and it was a charm to work with, especially after the rework.

 

Cheers Shaqalac.

[mediacowboy]

I've been following this since about the time ya started and i have to say that this look very nice.

[MG2R]

Good to know you got it working. Those were some issues you were having

Excited to see what's next on the menu.

[Shaqalac]

I've been following this since about the time ya started and i have to say that this look very nice.

Your words are too kind.

 

Good to know you got it working. Those were some issues you were having

Excited to see what's next on the menu.

As you can see I ended up with one hell of a working ghetto solutions. I really find it funny when a simple installation ends up looking so ridiculous like mine did, it worked however.

You should be excited. Sit tight, the update is in progress right now.

[Sardis]

This is awesome! The first thing that I noticed was how amazing those Kingston HyperX sticks look! I'm not usually a fan of Kingston but those look really nice. 

 

I may have missed it but have you decided on what type of media server software you are going to run on there? I'm a huge fan of Plex, it's been one of the best experiences I've had with any type of media delivery software I've ever used. I've got 8TB of media and it automatically sorts it all on the client side and gets the appropriate media info for you so no need to go through every single file and rename them or even have them in the same folder.

 

Does the RAID card have any features to accelerate it with a cache SSD?

[Stadiz]

I was the guy that posted you have my sword, and my bow and my NAS.

so I wanted to say, that this is a very nice post, nice clean pictures, camera?

How is the hand model carrier doing any luck?  :lol: 

HDD case looks and wonderfull!

[Shaqalac]

Update #12: Flash the M1015 they said, it would be easy they said. They were all lying...
 
It's been very long since I've made an update to this build log but the truth is it's been just as long since I've made some progress as well. The Debian installation was definitely not trouble free as explained in update #11 and it turned out that the IBM ServeRAID M1015 would wreak even more problems, problems more extensive than expected.

 

Before I began building this NAS I read that flashing a M1015 to act as an LSI 9211-8i would be fairly simple and a cheap solution. As you can see that's obviously what I went for and with the intention to use 's Flashing and LSI 9211-8i RAID Card to IT Mode for ZFS/Software RAID (Tutorial). If you take a look at the guide it looks simple and not that complicated at all, at least not once you understand the steps and the different terms. It turned out, as I've already spoiled, not to be as easy for me as the guide makes it look like.

 

The next part will be a somewhat summary of what I've posted in the guide thread.

aw's guide is using an UEFI method to clear the firmware of the M1015 and to install the new one. I therefore prepared and 4GB Kingston USB with all the files that aw's guide tells you to get. For further reference I'll call this UEFI USB stick Kingston USB.

Now to the actual flashing of the card, not so fast. Immediately I ran to a problem of booting the system with it not showing a picture on the screen, the same problem as I had during the installation of Debian. While I figured out how to install Debian I also tried to figure out how to get a picture on the screen with the M1015 connected to the system and the only solution I found was to reboot the system until a picture appeared. I'm not too fond of endlessly force shut down of a system, which was what I was doing. Sometimes a picture appeared without any reboots at all, sometimes a single reboot would do the trick, sometimes 10 reboots were required and sometimes I simply gave up because it got too uncomfortable.

 

Every once in a while I got a picture on the screen and were able to do some actual flashing. The first thing I realised was that MSI B85I had a built-in UEFI shell, which made things a bit easier as I didn't need to do trial and error on finding the right UEFI shell. While in the UEFI I was able to list all the files on the Kingston USB, so far so good. Once I ran the command to erase the current firmware I got an error that no LSI adapter were found, which was and still is weird as it was shown during boot and the LEDs on the card itself were illuminated.

 

I did some searching on the error I got and found this guy, who had the same problem as me. His solution was to boot from a MS DOS USB stick (Gray 1 USB) and then follow these instructions from the original post in the thread. It is basically the same method as aw's tutorial, it was just turned into 1-6 .bat files.

So I tried the MS DOS on the NAS and ended up with this error: ERROR: Failed to initialize PAL. Exiting program. I'm not sure what the error is all about but it seems to be limited by the motherboard in the NAS. At this point I pretty much ditched the idea of flashing the M1015 in the NAS.

 

It was suggested to find an old motherboard by aw and some other guy from the freeNAS forum and I found this lying around. Panz from freeNAS suggested a route of erasing the current firmware in MS DOS and the install the new one in UEFI. Ah yeah, I did try this method on the NAS once with a FAT and FAT32 format USB drive, without any luck obviously.

 

The old Fujitsu Siemens computer was a waste of time, sort of, I did make sure it wasn't an option. It wouldn't recognize the USB drives in any of the USB ports on the back I/O, only on the front I/O but it wouldn't go into MS DOS or UEFI.

 

My second last option at this point was my main rig with a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 motherboard.

Before I started on working on my main rig I made this chart or what you want to call it. It contains all the different guides and package solutions I've come across, old firmware, new firmware the lot. As you've read, if you're still with me, I had tried a few different things but I hadn't taken any notes at this point.

Flash of IBM ServeRAID M1015

Attempt template
USB stick:
Package folder name:
HDD attached to M1015:
Port on M1015 which drives is attached to:
Results:

Common
Kingston USB

• Format: MS DOS
• Size: 4GB
• MS DOS guide: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=c86a91f3b7672c66539cc7f0ca6711d6&topic=12767.0

Gray 1 USB

• Format: MS DOS
• Size: 250MB
• MS DOS guide: http://www.howtogeek.com/136987/how-to-create-a-bootable-dos-usb-drive/
• Format FAT32

Gray 2 USB

• Format: FAT
• Size: 250MB

Packages
MS DOS + UEFI P16
- http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ibm-m1015-boot-problem.17686/#post-111947
2118it.bin, mptsas2.rom updated to P16.

MS DOS bat P11
- http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=c86a91f3b7672c66539cc7f0ca6711d6&topic=12767.0

MS DOS P11
- http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
Files is as uploaded.

MS DOS P18
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
2118it.bin, mptsas2.rom updated to P18.

UEFI P18 - NAS - Shell
- http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/104425-flashing-an-lsi-9211-8i-raid-card-to-it-mode-for-zfssoftware-raid-tutorial/
UEFI shell is called Shell.efi

UEFI P18 - NAS - Shellxxx
- http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/104425-flashing-an-lsi-9211-8i-raid-card-to-it-mode-for-zfssoftware-raid-tutorial/
UEFI shell is called shellx64.efi

 

NAS
Motherboard: MSI B85I
CPU Architecture: X64

Main rig
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3
CPU Architecture: X64

775 socket computer
Motherboard: Asus
CPU Architecture: Unknown

 

Old computer
Motherboard: Unknown
CPU Architecture: Unknown

Even though I hadn't taken any notes I had established that it would most likely get a successful flash on the main rig.

After some trial and error the document looked like this.

Flash of IBM ServeRAID M1015

Attempt template
USB stick:
Package folder name:
HDD attached to M1015:
Port on M1015 which drives is attached to:
Results:

Common
Kingston USB

• Format: MS DOS
• Size: 4GB
• MS DOS guide: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=c86a91f3b7672c66539cc7f0ca6711d6&topic=12767.0

Gray 1 USB

• Format: MS DOS
• Size: 250MB
• MS DOS guide: http://www.howtogeek.com/136987/how-to-create-a-bootable-dos-usb-drive/
• Format FAT32

Gray 2 USB

• Format: FAT
• Size: 250MB

Packages
MS DOS + UEFI P16
- http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/ibm-m1015-boot-problem.17686/#post-111947
2118it.bin, mptsas2.rom updated to P16.

MS DOS bat P11
- http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=c86a91f3b7672c66539cc7f0ca6711d6&topic=12767.0

MS DOS P11
- http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
Files is as uploaded.

MS DOS P18
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
2118it.bin, mptsas2.rom updated to P18.

UEFI P18 - NAS - Shell
- http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/104425-flashing-an-lsi-9211-8i-raid-card-to-it-mode-for-zfssoftware-raid-tutorial/
UEFI shell is called Shell.efi

UEFI P18 - NAS - Shellxxx
- http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/104425-flashing-an-lsi-9211-8i-raid-card-to-it-mode-for-zfssoftware-raid-tutorial/
UEFI shell is called shellx64.efi

 

NAS
Motherboard: MSI B85I
CPU Architecture: X64

 

USB stick: Kingston USB

Package folder name: MS DOS bat P11

HDD attached to M1015: yes

Port on M1015 which drives is attached to: 0

Results: No adapters found.

http://i.imgur.com/d6jTQEU.jpg

Main rig
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3
CPU Architecture: X64

 

USB stick: Gray 1 USB

Package folder name: MS DOS bat P11

HDD attached to M1015: yes

Port on M1015 which drives is attached to: 0

Results: Megarec commands was a success, Flash Chip erased. Stuck at sas2flsh commands.

http://i.imgur.com/PqJ6Gdc.jpg

 

USB stick: Gray 1 USB

Package folder name: MS DOS P11

HDD attached to M1015: yes

Port on M1015 which drives is attached to: 0

Results: Megarec commands was a success, Flash Chip erased. Same as MS DOS bat P11, I'm stuck at the sas2flsh commands.

http://i.imgur.com/PqJ6Gdc.jpg

 

USB stick: Gray 1 USB

Package folder name: MS DOS P18

HDD attached to M1015: no

Port on M1015 which drives is attached to: n/a

Results: Stuck at the picture. It seems to be stuck because there's no drive attached to the M1015.

http://i.imgur.com/diIzyUO.jpg

 

USB stick: Gray 1 USB

Package folder name: MS DOS P18

HDD attached to M1015: yes

Port on M1015 which drives is attached to: 0

Results: Stuck at "Erasing Flash Chip (16MB)" for over an hour. Took a bold move and restarted the system as it wouldn't react to any keyboard commands. It does looks like the M1015 is still recognized by the system.

http://i.imgur.com/AZQly2h.jpg

775 socket computer
Motherboard: Asus
CPU Architecture: Unknown

 

Old computer
Motherboard: Unknown

CPU Architecture: Unknown

 

Couldn't get it to boot from the USB sticks, tried various USB ports on the front and the back.

The whole time I've tried to flash to M1015 to a LSI 9211-8i in IT mode but none of the methods I've tried have worked. aw suggested to try with a 9210-8i firmware.

 

I was using a MS DOS USB stick as I've had most progress with that. First I tried the newest firmware for 9210-8i but I didn't get any further than with a 9211-8i firmware. So I headed straight for the oldest firmware for 9210-8i on LSI's website and actually got one step further but it just got stuck again like I'd experience when erasing the flash chip. This was my LAST options, I did however try to reboot the system and try once more. Maybe just maybe, this was the right firmware, I did one step further than with any other method.

 

THE SOLUTION!

 

The oldest firmware for the 9210-8i was the solution, had I not rebooted the system to give it one more go with that firmware I would probably still be sitting with a M1015 instead of a 9210-8i in IT mode!

 

 

This was a long one and I'm just tired at this point, so forgive me for all the spelling errors. I will look through this post tomorrow and edit all the errors and add what I'll be doing with the build in the near future.

 

Update to the update

My plan for the near future is to get the system running. Set up the RAID, install packages, basically set the system up for my needs. After that I will focus on cable sleeving.

 

Cheers Shaqalac.

Edited April 17, 2014 by Shaqalac

[alpenwasser]

- Let's go on an adventure! -

Wow...

Happy you finally got it working though. It was pure luck that

I found out about the 9210-8i thing, which is kinda funny because

if I'd bothered to look up the 9210-8i on LSI's website it should

have been pretty apparent that the M1015 might be that model and

it might be worth a shot. It certainly doesn't look like a 9211-8i,

that's for sure.

Ah well, such is life.

[jscho]

Good to see you got it working!