Edelrat

Both of the things you want to do are possible, yes. But it the only thing you want to do is store files/games, just get a NAS (for example from Synology) since it will be easier to set up and draw way less power. You can also use it to save games on it, but it will be most likely slower than having the game on a HDD in your PC, because you will be limited to the speed of your network (which will be more then likely Gigabit, so about 120MB/s), unless you get 10Gb, which will be more expensive.

I use this one personally: https://www.draytek.com/en/products/products-a-z/router.all/vigor130/ Never had any problems with it, it can also be used as a router or as a modem, depending on the firmware you use on it.

You only need 3 drives for RAID 5, I don't know where that 4 drive thing comes from. Maybe people confuse it with RAID10 or RAID 6. Regarding your SATA-port question: Read in your manual which SATA-port shares bandwith with the m.2 slot and don't use that one. Just make sure to plug in all of the drives into the same controller (the Intel one preferably) , and that your controller is set to RAID-mode in the BIOS.

@leadeater With the other HBA, the drives didn't show up at all. I will probably just use FreeNAS as my OS and pass the drives though to a VM, will probably be the easiest thing to do. Thanks for your help anyway!

There are more than enough written or video guides on how to set up OPT-interfaces in pfSense out there, I am sure some are also in your language. By opt interface to port 80/443 I mean that you have to create a firewall rule to allow traffic from any client in your OPT-subnet to anywhere. pfSense creates a rule for your LAN-Interface to allow connections on every port. Since this isn't the case with OPT-interfaces you will have to create those rules on your own. For Internet access you at least need port 80 and 443, port 53 for DNS wouldn't hurt either. You could of course also just create a "from OPT-subnet to anywhere/any port" rule. You will either need an extra DHCP-server on your OPT-subnet or enable DHCP relay. The first option would be easier, and in fact you can have your pfSense box do this job. Also, your gateway address has to be the address of the interface on your router on the specific subnet. For example, if the IP-address of your OPT-interface is 192.168.2.1, for every client on the OPT-subnet, this will be the gateway (provided you don't have multiple gateways, which I doubt). If you only have a handfull of clients on the OPT-subnet, you could also just assign IP-addresses manually, just watch out for conflicts.

My best guess is initiator mode too. I doubt it's anything EMC specific, since I have the same model of shelf working currently (even with the same HBA, but with FreeNAS). I really doubt that it's the HDDs too, because at the moment they are just random drives I had laying around, most of them never saw an EMC controller. I will try another HBA next (with the one I am about to try I at least was able to use a iSCSI LUN from FreeNAS over FC without any problems under windows, maybe that will work. I will let you know what my results are.

When connecting them directly to the MB i can initialize them/bring them online without any problems. Clean also works. I also swapped one that was previously connected to the MB and already had a volume on it with one in the shelf. The one that previously had a volume on it is no longer showing it when in the shelf, the one that didn't show anything when in the shelf actually still has a old volume on it when connected to the MB,

Still the same thing after doing clean in diskpart on every disk.

Hello everyone, I have a FC disk shelf (KTB-STL4 to be exact) connected to my Windows Server 2016 machine with a Qlogic QLE2560 HBA. The drives are showing up fine in Windows disk mgmt, but I can't initialize the drives in the shelf or bring them online (some are already online for some reason). When I try to do any of this, I get the following error: 'incorrect function'. Error it gives me in the event log: VDS fails to write boot code on a disk during clean operation Error code: 80070001@02070008 The drives in the shelf are Seagate 1TB SATA HDDs, so I don't think it has anything to do with block size or any of that stuff (please correct me if I am wrong). The disks also work flawless when I put them directly into the machine. I had this working on FreeNAS, the only problem I had was that I had to put the HBA-port into initiator-mode before it worked. I don't think this is the issue either, since the drives are already showing up in Windows. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks!

The HBAs Linus uses in his new storinators are HighPoint Rocket 750s (if I remember correctly), he has two in each new storinator. One of the ports on this card supports 4 SAS or SATA drives (there are either backplanes which do the "splitting" or you can get cables that split into 4 SATA-Connectors). In general those cards are either called HBA (host bus adapter) which basically pass-though each individual drive to the OS, or RAID cards, which create RAID-arrays over multiple drives and present it to the OS as one big drive.

Transfering files between a PC connected with ethernet and a notebook connected with wifi is possible, yes. I think your issue with pings is your windows firewall. Try to disable it on both clients and see if pinging works now. I don't have an english version of Windows avaliable at the moment, so I can't look up the specific rule (at least not in english). You can find it pretty easily by sorting the incoming rules by protocol. There should be one or two rules which say something with "echo request" and ICMPv4 protocol (I assume you don't use IPv6?). The firewall you are talking about here is the firewall between LAN and WAN, it has nothing to do with clients in the LAN trying to communicate with each other. I would highly recommend you to keep this one enabled.

Buying a single HDD will be easier, and potentially save you some headache, its up to you to decide whether its worth it or not. Also, I don't think hybrid drives are really worth it, I usually stick to the normal SSD + HDD combo. Anyway, back to your questions: I would use hardware-raid myself, unless you are using ZFS (which won't be the case if you are installing windows). You can install Windows directly onto it, you may need to load the driver during the install tho (again, I would recommend a SSD for OS and some games or other stuff + HDD for anything else). I have never done RAID with hybrid drives, but I don't think it will make a huge difference (if any at all). For your use case you won't need a extra RAID controller, the onboard/Intel controller on your MB will do just fine. Also, if all you want is speed, just use RAID0, it will save you two drives. If you also want redundancy, use RAID5. For "normal" home use it should be good enough in terms of speed.

I assume by 'no ip' you mean a client connected to the OPT interface is not getting an IP address? If so, you have to either have a DHCP-server on the subnet or assign a IP address to the client manually. For internet you will have to allow traffic from your OPT interface to anywhere for port 80 and 443, after you have assigned the ip address and default gateway.

The only way I can think of is a fibre channel disk shelf. One example would be a NetApp DS14MK4. You put the hdds in the shelf, then connect the shelf via a HBA to your PC.

If you do a nslookup on the websites you are trying to access, how much time does it take to resolve the domain name. Remember to do a ipconfig /flushdns before trying this.