maximumpc.com SEP 2019 MAXIMUMPC 69
WELL, THAT WAS FUN. Except for the
building part. Before you embark on such
a project, consider this: Do you really need
a case this small? Life is much easier when
you have room to breathe. The final build
was certainly messy, but perhaps with
a differently arranged motherboard and
PSU, it would be less of a plastic jungle.
The fans in the Node 304 aren’t the quietest
creatures, but with them set on low, noise
was tolerable, and idle temperatures stayed
well below 40 C. Incidentally, if on first boot
OMV tells you that it can’t see the network
(and the network cable is definitely plugged
in), it’s possible that DHCP negotiations
just took a little too long. You can log in
locally with the username “admin” and
password “openmediavault” then type
“ip a” (everything without quotes here) to
see the correct IP. From then on, you can do
anything you want by visiting that IP address
in a browser, and using the slick web
interface. As is customary with all things
Linux, reading the relevant documentation
is a good idea, but your first port of call
should be “Storage > Disks” to wipe the
drives (this is especially important if they
have been involved in a RAID array before),
and then create your RAID array. You have
a few choices filesystem-wise—we went
for traditional Ext4, but on a larger array,
Btrfs might be a better idea. To be honest,
we would wait for OMV 5.0 until you did that,
because it will have much better support
for the new filesystem’s manifold bells and
whistles (in particular, its built-in RAID
pooling and magical self-healing abilities).
It was a shame not to be able to fit the
case with its full complement of six drives.
Indeed, it’s possible to run the OS from a
USB stick, so we could have had a four-
drive array (RAID 6 or 10), with two “hot”
spare drives. That was all moot thanks to
our motherboard’s weak offering of just four
SATA ports. RAID 5 is probably fine for our
purposes, but on larger (or older) drives, the
relentless reading that a rebuild (if the array
fails) necessitates will probably kill anotherdrive as well as your redundancy. And by
extension all your data. Oh yes—RAID is not
backup, so back up your precious files. It
left very little room behind the hard drives,
and with the case full, there probably would
have been airflow issues. Perhaps a modern
CPU and smaller cooler (say a Ryzen
2200G with stock cooling) would be more
suitable. It would also have been fun to use
the experimental SnapRAID and MergerFS
plugins (see June 2019 issue, pg. 17). But in
the end, we were impressed with OMV, and
pleased to make use of old hardware.NAUGHTY BUT NAS
(^1)
The Hyper 212 is one of the best
budget coolers there is, and we
liked that it just fitted into our case and
no more. Just being a NAS doesn’t
require much of the CPU, so it shouldn’t
generate much heat. We never saw
temper atures exceed 50 C, which was
achieved while streaming hi-res movies
with the Plex plugin.
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Be Quiet! makes lovely PSUs, but
650W is far more than we needed—
4 0 0W would probably have been fine.
The fan ends up exhausting a little close
to the ground, so carpeted floors are no
friend of this machine.
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Using old drives like this is a little
risk y, and consumer drives in
general aren’t meant for serious data
stor age. We just wanted the drives out of
our main machine, and probably would
survive if the data on them was lost. OMV
can monitor SMART statistics, which can
warn you about impending drive failure.
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