Adventures in mass storage

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We’ve been using a number of different computers as file servers here at the office, but we’re to the point now that we really need some kind of centralized data storage.  It’s one thing to have a single machine storing a few hundred gigabytes of data.  It’s something else entirely to scatter multiple terabytes across four or five machines, and then struggle to remember what’s where.

Last week we picked up two network attached storage (NAS) boxes:  a Thecus N5200, and a Thecus N7700.  The 5200 supports 5 drives and will be used primarily for offsite backup.  The 7700 supports 7 drives and will be our primary (only, hopefully) file server.

Setting these things up turned out to be quite an experience.  Not because of any problem with the Thecus boxes.  No, those things are wonderful, with very good documentation and a nice browser-based administration interface.  We had problems with the drives we bought to put in our fancy new RAID arrays.

Seagate recently released their Barracuda 7200.11, 1.5 terabyte drive.  We managed to get a great deal on the drives (about $110 each), and we picked up enough to populate the NAS boxes, plus a few high-powered machines here.

It turns out that early versions of the drive’s firmware have a bug that causes the drive to freeze and time out for minutes at a time, which in turn causes RAID controllers to think that the drive has failed.  The results aren’t pretty.  Fortunately, there’s a firmware upgrade available.  I downloaded mine from the NewEgg page for the drive.  Look on the right side about halfway down.  (This wasn’t a surprise.  We knew about the problem and about the firmware upgrade before we bought the drives.)

Applying the firmware upgrade turned into quite an experience.  You see, in order to apply the upgrade you need a DOS prompt.  Not a Windows command line prompt.  Once you manage to get a machine set up and booting FreeDOS from diskette or CD (you can’t boot from the hard drive because the firmware upgrade program wants to see only one hard drive), you can run the firmware upgrade.  It takes less than two minutes to boot the machine and apply the update.  Then the drive is ready to go, right?

Silly me.  I upgraded the firmware on five drives, put them in the N5200, and started the thing up.  Surprisingly, the N5200 reported that the drives were 500 GB, not the 1.5 TB that I thought I had.  But the label on the drive says 1.5 TB.  Whatever could be going on?

It turns out that one of the many things you can do in the drive’s firmware is set the size.  Want to turn your terabyte drive into a 32 gigabyte drive?  No problem!  A set of utilities from Seagate called SeaTools (download the ISO and burn to CD, then boot from the CD) includes diagnostics and an interface for setting the drive’s capacity.  One option is “Set capacity to max native”.  For me, SeaTools reports that setting the drive’s capacity failed, and adds “be sure that drive has been power cycled.”  When I turn the machine off and back on, the drive reports 1500.301 gigabytes.  There’s my 1.5 terabyte drive.

After upgrading the firmware on all drives and using SeaTools to set their capacities, I finally managed to get the RAID arrays set up.  The N5200 is running RAID-5, giving us about 5.4 terabytes for our offsite backup.  The N7700 is running RAID-6, giving us about 6.5 terabytes of live data in a single place.  That should hold us for a while.

A couple of notes on the Thecus boxes:

  • Initial setup of the Thecus is a little inconvenient.  The default IP address is 192.168.1.100, so I had to cobble together a network from an old switch and hook my laptop to it.  Once I changed the IP address to fit on our subnet (10.77.76.xxx), setup went quickly.  There might be a way to change the IP address from the front panel.  If so, that would probably be easier than throwing a network together.
  • The N5200 took almost 24 hours to format and create the RAID-5 array with five 1.5 terabyte drives.  The N7700 took about 8 hours to format and create the RAID-6 array with seven 1.5 terabyte drives.  I suppose this is just the result of better hardware and firmware.
  • There must be some magic incantation to configuring the date and time settings.  If I set the date and time, and tell it not to update with an NTP server, everything works just fine.  But if I enable NTP update (manual or automatic), then the time is totally screwed up.  One box was 11.5 hours slow, and the other was a few hours fast.  (As an aside, I have another piece of equipment that insists on reporting the time in UTC, even though I’ve set the time and told it that I’m in the US Central time zone.  I’m beginning to believe that *nix-based servers don’t like me.)
  • The Thecus boxes do way more than just serve files.  We probably won’t use all those features, but others might.  I especially like the support for USB printers, and the built-in FTP server.  With DHCP enabled and machines connected to a switch off the LAN port, one of these things is a  single-box subnet.  I don’t know what kind of traffic will pass from the WAN to the LAN ports on these things, but if it’s fully blocked it’d make an effective home router to connect to a cable modem.

Anyway, we’re in the middle of copying data and retiring or re-tasking some of our old file servers.  This is going to take some time.  A gigabit network is quick until you start copying multiple terabytes. . .