Norco ITX-S8 nas case 10 - The end (OS and hard drives)

March 27, 2017

I finally got OMV 3 installed. Once I got it working I went ahead and bought two Toshiba desktop hard drives. I wanted to test out some Toshiba hard drives because I haven't used any of those for a very long time. The price was right because I already had two hgst 2TB hard drives already so I just wanted to get something small to add to these two drives so that I could at least start backing up the old nas. The two hgst drives are almost new since the person I installed them for didn't really used them and donated them to me. I decided to just get the 3 TB drives since I figured if one of the smaller drives dies I can always just get another 3 TB and replace them. Even though I am not using the full drive, at least I could get started and test the nas and fill at least half of the drive bays. The old nas only has four 2TB drives which is the maximum I could use. Eventually I can just increase the size and expand the nas, hopefully.

Backing up or just copying to the new nas took a couple of days. I did this after I was sure the nas was working correctly and I had made my setup changes. The old nas was between 8kbits/s and 20 mb/s and a bit more some times. It was a very slow process to say the least. I also tried to re-organize some files a bit better. Here are a couple of pictures of the drives I got and the nas page.

 I wanted to a least stay with the 4TB drives to just double the current nas I had, but these were the lowest priced 7200 rpm drives I could get. The 7200 rpm was my own requirement. Unfortunately seagate for example won't even list their specs on the boxes, and what I found on their website is that most are 5600 rpm and even many sellers are pushing them as 7200 rpm when they are not. Many western digital are the same which is annoying since this is the first thing I look at. Don't get me wrong, lower rpm drives work great on laptops and portables like that. I have been using the one that came with my laptop and it's been great on the battery. So they have their place, but for a faster nas, higher rpm is what works better unless you care more about super low power saving with a slower transfer rate. Case in point, I went from around 20 mb/s on my old nas to about 100 mb/s. It varied so this is just to illustrate my point. Now I have been able to organize my pictures within the nas, moving, deleting and so on, much easier and I am actually using the nas more which is really nice. Now I just wish I had done all this much earlier. Man, it sure it's nice moving larger files a lot quicker now. I started copying the files over just to back up, but once I saw the big change I just went for it, and turned off the old nas so I could just use the new one.

 The 3TB is the highest you can go for these red P300 hard drives. You should also note that I checked the serials of these on their site but got nothing so I think they need to figure that out. I have yet to test their support so we'll see what happens then. If the drives work, the support won't be needed but time will tell.

 I have not tested any of the blacks so I can't tell you how well they work, but at this point, I can now just wait for the larger drives and ssd's to come down even more as long as these drives don't give me any problems.

In short, here's a screenshot of the drives and temps. The temps are in par with the old nas. So as long as the cooling is working correctly the higher temps on the 7200 rpm drives should be stable and not increase more than normal. So far the Toshiba drives are working fine. I just hope they increase the warranty and that they work for a long time. Only time will tell. My nas is mostly idle or off most of the time so I have  no problem using these desktop drives. OMV seems to be fine with them so far. Not the the OS cares what brand it has.

Here is the toshiba hard drive datasheet which shows the operating temperature for this hard drive and you can see that I'm well within the range.
https://www.toshiba.eu/Contents/Toshiba_teg/EU/Others/HDD_datasheets/P300_High-Performance_Hard_Drive_Datasheet.pdf

Here is the HGST drive datasheet.
https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/DS7K3000_ds.pdf

So for the setup I have four drives in raid 5 just like my old nas. I figured I can make a another raid five with the other four drives or I could make one large raid 6 but I think two separate raids will work just fine too.  The thinking here is to use the other raid as a backup for the first raid, but we'll see how this goes when the time comes and I add more hard drives. The goal for now was to backup the old nas to the new one. I still have a bit more room before I fill these drives so we'll see how that goes, but so far I like how everything is working now.

I found another old 500Gb sata hard drive and thought I put that in since I noticed the two higher drives where running slight warmer than the others. It looks like having just the empty bays keeps the air from really cooling the lower drives since the air really just goes straight through to the back. So it looks like it is best to keep all the bays filled so the air travels closer to the hard drives and not just above the empty space, or below depending on how you set your nas drives up. So far they have stabilized. I finally left the nas on for a couple of days straight to get a better idea of the temps. Although some older models may seem a bit on the warmer side, they are still under the specified working temps. Now I just wished I hadn't used the other 500gb drive in the dvr which just fried the drive. I could have at least kept most of the bays filled to keep the air more even throughout the nas even though I am not using these spare drives for anything. It's not necessary but since I'm keeping a close eye on it I like to see what's going on. By the way, due to how I set my drives starting from the bottom to the top, the last drive on here is actually the topmost drive I have. I have them labeled so it's not hard to figure out but it's just something to note when you set your hard drive order on the nas itself. Top heavy is a mute point once it's all filled up anyway.

Now that everything is working, it would be a good time to back up the main OS hard drive just in case.

Norco ITX-S8 nas case 1 - The build
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 2 - The build

Norco ITX-S8 nas case 3 - The build

Norco ITX-S8 nas case 4 - The build (Software)

Norco ITX-S8 nas case 5 - The build (Software continued)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 6 - The build (Fan replacements)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 7 - The build (Fans continued)
Norco ITX-S8 nas case 8 - The build  (2.5 Hard drive update)

Norco ITX-S8 nas case 9 - The build (2.5 hard drive update continues)

Norco ITX-S8 nas case 11 - Upgrading the memory in 2022