I found an interesting quirk that tripped me up, wanted to share it so that hopefully you don 't...

[G+_John Mink]

I found an interesting quirk that tripped me up, wanted to share it so that hopefully you don't need to spend AS LONG on weird problems like this:

 

 

I'm repurposing an old machine as a NAS4FREE box and BIOS recognized all 12 HDDs (8 Sata ports + 4 via a PCIe card) and would recognized the keyboard input to go to "select boot device" menu as expected.  But as soon as I got in there, the keyboard stopped responding.  Tried 3 different keyboards with the same result (all 3 worked on other machines...and even that one--at first)

 

It ended up that if I took out a few HDDs on boot, the BIOS was able to manage just fine (and for the record they weren't all on the PCIe card).

 

Just something to keep in mind when building computers with lots of hard drives (especially when you're expanding the number of ports), or just standing near Allyn Malventano.

[G+_610GARAGE]

That's weird. Sounds like there is a memory overrun within the bios. They probably never planed someone would hook up 12 hdd. :)

[G+_John Mink]

Those slackers!  :p

[G+_Akira Yamanita]

How many did you have to remove before it would work?

[G+_Eddie Foy]

Adding a raid controller would solve it if it were a memory/bios issue.  Since the controllers have their own bios.

[G+_John Mink]

Akira Yamanita? I had a suspicion that removing 4 would do it, didn't try less

[G+_John Mink]

Eddie Foy? That could be, but I don't want to deal with hardware RAID in this system

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

John Mink You'll want an HBA (host bus adapter) instead of a RAID card.  Something that just provides more SATA ports and doesn't do any RAID things for you.  They're cheaper than a true RAID card (in this case you could also use those cheap "Fake RAID" cards.)  Anything that supports pass through or JBOD.

 

Also, look at www.xbyte.com, www.stikc.com, and www.servermonkey.com if your looking for server grade equipment on the cheap.

[G+_John Mink]

Travis Hershberger the card I got is certainly not a "true" raid card....and even if it were all I'm having it do is pass the drives through (exactly what you suggest).

 

I don't know if it's HBA or "fake raid" but it was super cheap.  Basically, I don't really expect this to be a problem as I won't be rebooting often and even when I do, I can set the default drive to be the OS, so no keyboard input is required.

[G+_Jason Marsh]

At least you can get your OS installed and then finish configuration over the network after reconnecting the drives. That's gonna be one mean storage system when you get done with it. We're gonna need to see some pics of this beast.

[G+_John Mink]

Jason Marsh? that's the plan! After all you can't really do much configuration of NAS4FREE locally, basically everything apart from getting an IP address is done through a web UI.

 

I'll see what I can do about pictures, but it's a pretty minimalist build.. Just not sure how well it'll show off in pictures

[G+_Jason Marsh]

Hey, if 12 drives is a minimal build for you, I'd like to see something you'd call a major build. I've never put more than 4 drives in a machine, so 12 would look pretty cool to me. I'm thinking this must be a nice little rackmount case or a monstrosity of a tower. If  anyone else might draw inspiration from it for their own storage server build, then you're kind of morally obliged to share ;)

[G+_John Mink]

Jason Marsh?? yeah, it's a rackmountable case.

 

I meant minimal in the sense of there's not much to look at because of the way he case is built. For instance, you can't really see the drives and the rest of the hardware at the same time.

 

But clearly I'm just getting bogged down in details to someone who already made up their mind :p?