N100 Unraid Build and Synology Migration

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 13:09:19 -0400

Parts List:

n100 motherboard
32GB DDR5 4800MHz RAM
m.2 to 6x SATA adapter
5.25" to Cooled 3.5" Adapter
Additional 2.5" Drive Tray
2x 12TB Refurbished SATA HDD
3x Assorted 6TB HDD
4x 1TB SATA SSD
1x 1TB nvme cache SSD
Old 600W EVGA Power Supply
Old Rosewell Mid-Tower Case

I recently moved my “production” homelab to an n100 based NAS I build in an old gaming computer case, from a Dell PowerEdge R630 and a Synology DS220+. It was a three step move, step one was to get the new box up and running. Step two was to transfer the data from the synology and the workload from the PowerEdge. Step 3 was to get the remaining drives out of the Synology and PowerEdge and into the new Unraid box.

The Build

It has been a bit since I have built a computer, and this was a bit of a new experience. The N100 board is a small forum factor, and already had the CPU and cooled built into the board. I have also never filled a case with so many drives. Now I didn’t add all of them until later on, but as you can see by the part list, it was ended up loaded.

It took some time to remove the old motherboard and drives. The old system was the motherboard from the first computer I ever built in 2012 - an AM3+ motherboard that started with a Phenom II x4 cpu that was later upgraded to an AMD FX-8350. I am still a sucker for the logo design on those chips.

Once I got the initial build done - n100 mounted, power and front panel headers connected, and 3 of the hard drives (2x 12TB, 1x 6TB) I was ready to get the OS installed. With Unraid, you install the OS on a USB drive. This board, being built as a NAS motherboard, had an internal USB 3.0. So I imaged a 64GB USB (which required me to manually make the USB bootable. I also only make a 20GB partition so I didn’t have to bother doing anything weird to get a FAT32 partition on it.)

Moving the data

Once everything was booted, I added a 12TB drive for parity, and the other 2 drives as data disks. It was going to take over a day to calculate parity, so I started transferring the data from the Synology. I found the best method was to setup and mount an NFS share from the Synology on the Unraid box. I added NFS to my network share and added the IP of the Unraid box as read/write.

Setup your share in unraid. In this example, the share name will be share
Mount the old servers share. Example NFS mount command bellow. Replace IP with your server’s IP, /share with the share name, and /synology/share with where you want to mount it.

mount -t nfs 10.10.0.10:/share /synology/share

Use rsync to ensure a full sync between the two devices

rsync /synology/share/ /mnt/share

This make take a long time to complete, depending on the amount of data you are moving.

Moving the Drives

I am going to skip past setting up all my docker containers, since I recreated them all and didn’t migrate. So at this point, I was able to take 4x 1TB SSD’s out of my PowerEdge since my workload had been moved to docker on the Unraid box, and 2x 6TB drives from the Synology.

I shutdown the Unraid box, and wired up the new drives. Once back in unraid, I added the SSD’s to a pool, which by default setup a mirror btrfs filesystem, which is what I wanted. So no change needed there.

I also added the 6TB drives to the array. Before it allowed me to format them, Unraid does a disk clear. This means the disk is written with all 0’s so parity is not lost and does not need to be recalculated. This is done automatically, you do not need to do anything special. Once the disk clear was done (It took somewhere between 3-6 hours, I was not keeping close track) I was able to format the drives with a file system (literally pressing the format button) and they were now part of the main protected array.

Overkill PowerEdge server or Underpowered NAS board

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 16:02:21 -0400

Currently, I am in the process from moving from a dual xeon cpu poweredge with 128GB of RAM running Proxmox, to a N100 white-label NAS motherboard I got for $120 off AliExpress running Unraid. This may sound like a crazy proposition, but hear me out.

Power - Big enterprise hardware is meant to be used and abused. Therefore, its idle power consumption is not really a concern. This means that even though I am only using 1% of the CPU at idle, I am still using ~200 watts, and if I do start taxing it, it can easily for towards 1000 watts.
3.5" Hard Drives - All of the servers I own are 1U servers, and only have 2.5" drive bays. Although I do not need nearly as much compute as I have available on the power edge, I do want to upgrade my storage. Most of my data is kept on a Synology DS220+ with 2x 6TB Western Digital Red drives in RAID 0 (I know this is insane and want to change it, thats part of what we are doing here). The plan is to setup the N100 as my primary NAS, which will have 12 SATA ports and will be in a case large enough to handle lots of 3.5" drives. Then I can convert the Synology to RAID 1 and use it for backups.
Unraid for array expandability - My Synology could only take 2 hard drives. The big benefits of Unraid for me will be the ability to add more drives at a later date, and being able to mix drive sizes. I have a spare 6TB drive, a ton of 1TB SSDs, and two 12TB used enterprise hard drives on the way.

My main concern is that I won’t have enough computer. Sure, I can always still boot up the big servers if I have a large task I need to handle, but they can’t stay running 24/7 since the point of all this is to lower power consumption. To help this, I am going to get my RPi 5 which has been collecting dust on a shelf setup as well. Most of what I currently have running in the lab are docker containers, so it will be easy to migrate some of those workloads to the Pi. I also have an old i3 NUC from 2015 I could boot up if I need to as well, but I would rather avoid it since it needs a new drive and probably isn’t worth the investment.

I am currently still waiting for the board to come in, and I will make a post going over the new setup once it arrives!

Homelab on CatalystND

N100 Unraid Build and Synology Migration

The Build

Moving the data

Moving the Drives

Overkill PowerEdge server or Underpowered NAS board