NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
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 ...
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.
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
