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Forum Discussion
Add SSD drive(s) to RN528X
My RN528x is configured with 8x4TB Toshiba HDD's. Product arrived preconfigured with X-RAID, which chose a RAID 6 configuration. System reports about 21TB usable out of 32TB. I've only loaded up 2TB ...
I have an RN424 , and tried to insert the nvme disk into m.2 slot,and restart readynas , then login ReadyOS via SSH , did not found out anything about this nvme disk:
root@readynas:~# lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT sda 8:0 0 1.8T 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 4G 0 part │ └─md0 9:0 0 4G 0 raid1 / ├─sda2 8:2 0 512M 0 part └─sda3 8:3 0 1.8T 0 part sdb 8:16 0 1.8T 0 disk ├─sdb1 8:17 0 4G 0 part ├─sdb2 8:18 0 512M 0 part └─sdb3 8:19 0 1.8T 0 part sdc 8:32 0 2.7T 0 disk ├─sdc1 8:33 0 4G 0 part ├─sdc2 8:34 0 512M 0 part └─sdc3 8:35 0 1.8T 0 part root@readynas:~#
And I googled this m.2 slot what it should be used for , and did not found out any useful information.
Just my 2 cents here:
First, on the M.2 slot:
If the RN528X has implemented the M.2 slot on the back of the MB the same way as the RN526X did, then the slot is wired as SATA-only (no PCIe lanes, so no NVMe, alas!)
It is routed to an on-board 2-channel Marvel 88SE9170 SATA chip, which also drives the eSATA on the back of the unit. The main 6 disks in the 526 are driven by the on-chip 6-channel SATA controller built into the Xeon D1508 SoC.
I'm curious how the extra 2 SATA channels are implemented on the RN528X - is there a second 88SE9170 on the MB, or did they use a 4-channel SATA chip - 88SE9215, 88SE9235, 88SE9345,... ?
Second, on the use of that M.2 slot:
I've added a SATA-III M.2 SSD (Transcend TS128GMTS400) in that slot, which I chose mostly for its length (42mm), so that I didn't have to risk moving the securing nut on the MB to the 600mm position, and I can attest that it works fine. It is NOT recognized by ReadyNAS OS in any way on the web-interface. It does not show up in the configuration options at all. My main use of this SSD is to speed up the RAID-1 that hosts the root filesystem, by manually adding a partition from the SSD to the RAID-1, and then marking all spinning disks' partitions as 'write-mostly'. That gives me the double benefit of read speed, which is now SSD-like, and of not having to wait for my system disks to spin up from powersave - the SSD is there immediately serving my commands, while the (write-mostly) HDDs are waking up. Makes for a really responsive system!
Thirdly, I wanted to report that the PCIe x8 slot on the MB is fully functional, albeit in an awkward position (retreated about an inch back), so one can use it for internal PCIe cards with any 90-degrees x8 PCIe riser card (I'm using one from a SuperMicro server). But you need a special offset one if you want to have the connectors plate of a the card bolted to the low-profile PCIe opening on the back of the unit. I searched long, and never found such an offset riser - maybe NETGEAR never produced it? Anyone knowing more about it?
I've plugged a 4-channel SATA card (88SE9235) without the mounting bracket into mine, and am going to try adding 4 regular 2.5" SSDs in the box, to use them for Data Tiering.
Not sure if ReadyNAS OS 6.10 will recognize them and use them at all.
I'll report back when I know more.
root@RN526X:~# lspci|grep SATA
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller 1 [AHCI mode] (rev 05)
01:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9235 PCIe 2.0 x2 4-port SATA 6 Gb/s Controller (rev 11)
05:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 9170 (rev 13)
Interesting. I've played around with adding cards to the rack-mount varieties (RN4200V2, RD5200, RN4220), and the card always "reserves" the slot for Drive 1. So a 12-bay NAS has what should be drive 1 show up as drive 2, 2 shows as 3, and so on down the line. The drives attached ot the added card are not visible to the GUI, but work fine once an MDADM RAID and BTRFS file system are created and mounted via SSH. From there, the GUI works fine with that volume.
Interestingly, RAIDar shows all the drives, so the GUI sems to be intentionally ignoring them because they don't "fit" into the NAS model definition.
I used a couple different SAS HBA's, not SATA, so I'll be interested in what you find.
The order in which drives are discovered is determind by the order in which the controllers are discovered by the kernel during OS boot. In many cases this order follows the PCI slot numbering, and on-board controllers usually show up before expansion cards, because the PCI bus enumerates on-board devices with lower numeric IDs than the ones in expansion slots. But this is not always the case (and also the PCI IDs may be given in a different order by the BIOS), and it may even change between different ways of booting the machine - for example if the kernel loads the device driver for a given SAS controller at a later stage in the boot process, then the disks connected to that controller will show up later than the disks connected to a controller whose driver was loaded earlier.
That probably explains your observation of disk-order changes when additional SAS controllers were plugged in the system.
Yes, the way they are discovered by the underlying Linux system is that way. But the way the OS treats them may well be quite different.
On my RD5200 running OS6, drive discovery is by column, lower left to upper right. Lower left drive is sda, one above it sdb, ,and one in upper right is sdl. But the OS labels them by row, top left to bottom right -- drive 1 is upper left, drive 2 to it's right, and drive 12 in lower rignt. Those are all on the onboard SAS controller and a SAS expander backplane (that's how Netgear built them).
My RN4200 runing OS6 has the Linux sda, sdb, etc. in the same order as the OS shows them on the RD5200. Drives 1-4 are connected to the onboard SATA ports 1-4 (with 5 and 6 empty) and drives 5-12 are on the two onboard SAS ports with direct SAS/SATA cabling (that's how Netgear built those, even though the motherboard is essentially the same as the RD5200).
So, what you see (or don't) in the OS may not be the same as shows up in the underlying Linux.
BTW, nothng above drive 12 shows up on either in the GUI.
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