Using an old EEEPC701

[Schievelbein]

I am trying to have some fun and save some money.
I have 4x1TB drives and 4x2TB drives in Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 "4-Bay 3.5" SATA to USB 3.0 Hard Drive Enclosures". When I hook them up to my Ubuntu or Windows machines, using USB, the four drives show up great. I can format the drives and use them in either OS.

I took an old EEEPC-701 netbook out of the attic and loaded the latest 8.X version on it. It loads fine and I love the interface. When I try to Create or Import a volume, it only sees the 8GB internal data harddrive. I have tried formatting the drives in a variety of formats and fashions, although, I cannot figure out how to format them in UFS. Since I had all of the hardware laying around, I would like to add the drives as RAIDed units as storage for my kids and keep their files off my Buffalo NAS. It is a shame to throw the drives out, but not cost effective to buy NAS enclosures....

I am not worried about speed, because it will only be used for overnight backups and recovery. I am not worried about the drives becoming disconnected, since each enclosure only has one USB cable and is divided via the enclosures internal hub.

Please let me know if I am wasting my time or if this is all possible.

 

[jgreco]

So ... it sounds like FreeNAS isn't seeing the USB drives?

I haven't seen a 701, so I don't really know much about it. Do the drives get listed in the BIOS? Do they show up in the FreeNAS "Create Volume" dialog? That's where you'd go to create a UFS volume out of them.

http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee does list the 701 and doesn't seem to say anything particularly negative about it, so it seems like a likely candidate to work.

 

[Schievelbein]

The EEEPC701 is one of the first Netbooks.
It only has a 4GB HD and USB ports.
I have the HDs hooked up via the USB ports, so they DO NOT show up in the BIOS.
The drives work if I load the machine with Windoze.
I guess my question more is whether I can RAID my USB harddrives, or even use USB hard drives with FreeNas at all.....

 

[jgreco]

Most contemporary BIOS offerings are able to boot from an external storage device such as a CDROM drive, flash disk, or hard drive attached by USB. I am _suspicious_ of more fundamental problems if your drives are not being seen by the BIOS. However, there is no guarantee that the eee pc BIOS will act in any given manner with a USB HDD, this is usually a matter of specific settings and stuff like that, which is solidly in your court to research and experiment with.

So here's what I can tell you. I took a scratch disk and tossed it in a nice little hard drive enclosure (Sans Digital makes a really nice aluminum one with USB2 and eSATA, with firewire too if you need it, really nice and solid). Hooked it up to a FreeNAS 8.0.1R box, just to be sure I was getting the specifics right.

When you hook up the USB HDD, you will see something like

ugen3.3: <Sans Digital> at usbus3
umass1: <Interface0> on usbus3
da1 at umass-sim1 bus 1 scbus7 target 0 lun 0
da1: <Ext Hard Disk > Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
da1: 40.000MB/s transfers
da1: 238475MB (488397168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 30401C)

pop up on console and/or dmesg. Check! You can use the "9) Shell" access to get a shell, and then type "dmesg". If you don't see this at the bottom after just having attached a USB HDD, something is wrong. If you attach the drives prior to boot, messages like these for each drive should appear somewhere in the "dmesg" output (but remember the dmesg buffer is a limited size, so best to try it on a fresh boot).

Once I attached the drive, the FreeNAS GUI immediately allowed me to go to Storage -> Volumes -> Create Volume and offered da1 (250.1GB) as an option. No reboot or putzing around required. If you are not seeing some (or any) of these things, there's something amiss. FreeNAS has the capability. USB-attached storage ain't gonna be as fast, but it's certainly supported.

I guess the only thing I wonder is whether or not the specific USB chipset your eee pc is using is supported by FreeNAS/FreeBSD. We can work our way through that too.

 

[Schievelbein]

Thank you very much for your help.
I hope that others can learn from this also.

I have been doing a bunch of troubleshooting and here is what I know.

Both a single HD and my HF2-SU3S work in WindowsXP, so it is not a hardware or port issue.
Both a single and my HF2-SU3S work in Ubuntu LiveCD.
When I install FreeNAS 8 to the 4GB HD and follow the instructions above, for a single drive, I get a bunch of lines similar to our above.

For my HF2-SU3S when I plug it into the USB, it spins up and shows a lot of activity for about 30 seconds and then I get:
ugen0.2 <unknown> at usb0 (disconnected)
and nothing else and it does not show up in the 'Import Volume' or anywhere else.
The 4 drives in my HF2-SU3S are all formatted NTFS, does that matter?
They show up fine on Win & Ubuntu.

To me it seems like a drives issue with FreeBSD. I will try and find a LiveCD to test that theory with.
Any more suggestion or tests that I can do?
Thanks again for the help.

 

[jgreco]

You're best off trying the LiveCD, which can help identify what driver, etc., is needed. I'm wondering if FreeNAS is missing one that you need.

 

[Schievelbein]

I am a novice with Unix/Linux, so could someone tell me how to determine how to load the FreeNAS driver for my HF2-SU2S2 units.
I tried a FreeBSD bootable DVD and it does not see the unit, the same as FreeNAS.

I know that the USB port and cables are working because they work on other harddrives on same machine.
HF2-SU2S2 works on other systems using USB2.0 also.

On plugging in the using, I get the message:
ugen0.2 <unknown> at usb0 (disconnected)

On Windows, the unit ID is VID_152D&PID2339

Any suggests or advise.

 

[Schievelbein]

Update - Version 8.02 fixed the problem.
Now I can go forward and learn FreeNAS.