Making use of Black Friday
Black Friday as a concept is confusing as it no longer has anything to do with a specific Friday and currently seems to cover at least 2 weeks of promotions. I did get some good prices even before Black Friday actually started.
Adventures with SSD and NAS Versions kept me busy over the weekend, resurrecting an older NAS unit with Solid State Drives for a very quiet media storage device.
NASλ︎
Resurected a Thecus N3200 Pro Network Attached Storage (NAS) unit and learned some new Linux commands and more about NFS along the way.
The Thecus N3200 was previously used as storage for an Linux entertainment system powered by ..., connected to a normal TV. The Thecus had 3 x 3.5" hard drives which gave up to 4TB if used in a RAID 5 configuration. The NAS was bought many many years ago so not the fastest by a long way, but it was fast enough to stream music and video from.
There was some noise from the 3 hard drives it supported, although it was only heard when not playing something. The fan in the Thecus NAS was fairly quite, so the theory was that with SSD drives then the NAS should be very quite indeed.
I bought 3 SSD drives to create a RAID 5 array in the Thecus NAS. I found the fanxiang 2TB SSD SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5″ drives were at a reasonable price on Smile.amazon.co.uk. These SSD's had good reviews and it will be interesting to see how well they last.
The fanxiang SSD are 2.5" size, so a SABRENT 2.5" to 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Adapter Converter mounting Frame was used to fit them into the Thecus Nas.
The Thecus NAS provides clip-in rails to fit the drives into the drive bay, with a thumbscrew on each rail to securely fit the drive without need for a tool (other than your finger and thumb).
Using the Web console, it was very simple to create a RAID 5 array, although it did take more than a day to build the RAID 5 array, with all the parity checking.
RAID 5 used as reliability of disks is an unknown
Once the RAID array was build, then there was a handy utility to create a shared folder which could be exposed via NFS, allowing me to write and read files from the NAS.
As the Thecus N3200 Pro is quite old, there hasnt been a firmware upgrade in quite some time. Therefore the NAS only had NFS version 3 (NFS 4 is not common). This did prevent me from connecting with the usual NFS share commands. I found that adding the vers=3 (or its alias nfsvers=3) as an nfs mount option made it all work nicely.
Define mount points for NFS shares
Any changes to the /etc/fstab file should be reloaded using the systemctl daemon-reload command
In nautilus file explorer the mount points are shown, so clicking on them I could start adding my files and backing up my laptops.
Thank you.
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