Tony Self
Contributor
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2017
- Messages
- 130
Hi Guys,
It looks as though you have another convert, but I am going to need some help to get me up and running.
I come from an IT background, but I am now retired and spending my life chilling out on a small island in Thailand.
Over recent years I have built various media servers. I started with a home built server running Windows Home Server, which I then upgraded to WHS2011. When I needed more disk space I purchased a Sans Digital TR4M+BNC drive enclosure which gave me four extras bays. I then bought myself a HP Proliant Microserver N40L and moved the WHS2011 system over. Next I started having problems with WHS2011 and eventually the system disk failed on me, so rather repair the system disk, I decided the time had come to move over to Linux. This was a brand new environment for having been a Windows man for most of my working life. A product that appealed to me at the time was Amahi as it was going to protect me for having to get to grips with raw Linux from the start.
Amahi has served me well for the last few years and I have migrated up to the current release 9 running or Fedora 23. But I had got to the stage where my Plex Media Server was beginning to have video transcoding issues on the HP N40L, so I decided the time had come to upgrade my hardware. While I was back in the UK for Christmas, I picked up a very good deal on a HP Proliant Microserver Gen8. This is the Celeron G1610T model, but I plan to upgrade the processor to a Xeon E3-1265L v2 in a month or so.
In the meantime I had the job of moving across my existing Amahi/Fedora system across to the new box. I anticipated this being a fairly straightforward process, but how wrong I was.
I got around the awkward boot order problems, but I could not get around the problem with the RocketRaid 622 which provides the eSata connection to the Sans Digital TR4M drive enclosure, not letting Fedora see the drives in the enclosure. I have spent the last week or so talking to Sans Digital, Highpoint (RocketRaid producers) and HP and trawling around various HP Gen8 forums. I seemed to be getting nowhere. I had got to the stage where I thought I was going to find a solution with my existing equipment and that I would probably have to new kit to extend the storage capabilities on my new Gen8.
It was at this stage I thought I needed to try and consolidate my media data on to just 4 3TB drives in the Gen8 and perhaps use my N40L to setup a simple NAS server to provide my Gen8 with additional storage on my network. To cut a long story short, this lead me to the FreeNAS.org site where I discovered that FreeNAS also supported Plex Media Server, Sickbeard, Couchpotato and SABNZBDPlus, the main apps I run on my Amahi server. I thought lets see whether the FreeNAS can see drives in the Sans Digital drive enclosure, so this morning I did a test. I haven't even done the full install yet, because as soon as I booted up the install USB it presented all the drives I had installed in the Gen8 and the TR4M. So as far as I am concerned now, Amahi is history, I will install FreeNAS on my Gen8.
What I need before I proceed is the answer to two questions: -
1. What is the optimal size for my boot drive. I have two SSDs one a 120GB and the other 480GB?
2. What will be the best way to migrate my data drives from the Amahi system to FreeNAS. I have 8 x 3TB drives. Amahi used a disk pooling system called Greyhole, so the data is easily readable on Ext4 formatted drives. At the moment I have managed to squeeze all the data on to 6 of the drives, leaving two free that can be reformatted is necessary .
Some guidance please.
Tony Self
It looks as though you have another convert, but I am going to need some help to get me up and running.
I come from an IT background, but I am now retired and spending my life chilling out on a small island in Thailand.
Over recent years I have built various media servers. I started with a home built server running Windows Home Server, which I then upgraded to WHS2011. When I needed more disk space I purchased a Sans Digital TR4M+BNC drive enclosure which gave me four extras bays. I then bought myself a HP Proliant Microserver N40L and moved the WHS2011 system over. Next I started having problems with WHS2011 and eventually the system disk failed on me, so rather repair the system disk, I decided the time had come to move over to Linux. This was a brand new environment for having been a Windows man for most of my working life. A product that appealed to me at the time was Amahi as it was going to protect me for having to get to grips with raw Linux from the start.
Amahi has served me well for the last few years and I have migrated up to the current release 9 running or Fedora 23. But I had got to the stage where my Plex Media Server was beginning to have video transcoding issues on the HP N40L, so I decided the time had come to upgrade my hardware. While I was back in the UK for Christmas, I picked up a very good deal on a HP Proliant Microserver Gen8. This is the Celeron G1610T model, but I plan to upgrade the processor to a Xeon E3-1265L v2 in a month or so.
In the meantime I had the job of moving across my existing Amahi/Fedora system across to the new box. I anticipated this being a fairly straightforward process, but how wrong I was.
I got around the awkward boot order problems, but I could not get around the problem with the RocketRaid 622 which provides the eSata connection to the Sans Digital TR4M drive enclosure, not letting Fedora see the drives in the enclosure. I have spent the last week or so talking to Sans Digital, Highpoint (RocketRaid producers) and HP and trawling around various HP Gen8 forums. I seemed to be getting nowhere. I had got to the stage where I thought I was going to find a solution with my existing equipment and that I would probably have to new kit to extend the storage capabilities on my new Gen8.
It was at this stage I thought I needed to try and consolidate my media data on to just 4 3TB drives in the Gen8 and perhaps use my N40L to setup a simple NAS server to provide my Gen8 with additional storage on my network. To cut a long story short, this lead me to the FreeNAS.org site where I discovered that FreeNAS also supported Plex Media Server, Sickbeard, Couchpotato and SABNZBDPlus, the main apps I run on my Amahi server. I thought lets see whether the FreeNAS can see drives in the Sans Digital drive enclosure, so this morning I did a test. I haven't even done the full install yet, because as soon as I booted up the install USB it presented all the drives I had installed in the Gen8 and the TR4M. So as far as I am concerned now, Amahi is history, I will install FreeNAS on my Gen8.
What I need before I proceed is the answer to two questions: -
1. What is the optimal size for my boot drive. I have two SSDs one a 120GB and the other 480GB?
2. What will be the best way to migrate my data drives from the Amahi system to FreeNAS. I have 8 x 3TB drives. Amahi used a disk pooling system called Greyhole, so the data is easily readable on Ext4 formatted drives. At the moment I have managed to squeeze all the data on to 6 of the drives, leaving two free that can be reformatted is necessary .
Some guidance please.
Tony Self
