NASLite Network Attached Storage

As per title - what gives?

Drive is Western Digital 2.5TB Green.

NL2 does not see an incredible 2TB of the drive!!!!

Any hints as to why that should be?

EDIT: NL2 does not like the taste of the 2.5TB WD Green HDD.

I put another HDD in there - another WD Green, but a 2TB one, and it is currently formatting.

The 2.5TB drive will only format 2246 inode tables, but the 2TB one is in the process of formatting 14905 inode tables.

...something wrong here, with respect to how NL2 is dealing with the 2.5TB drive...

ANOTHER EDIT: OK, 2.5TB drive has only 276GB available, but the 2TB drive(now formated, mounted and exported) has 1.8TB of available space, which sounds about right.

Any comments or suggestions?

This is interesting. Once in the server(using web-interface), specs for 2.5TB drive show inode count of 36798464, but when I formatted the drive, it definetly only formatted 2264 inodes.

Not sure if that is relebant or not....

Copy of report on Disk-0:

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Server Storage Disk-0

General:
This page provides specific information pertaining to Disk-0. Hardware, filesystem and S.M.A.R.T. details are listed below.



Disk-0 Hardware Details:

MODEL: WDC WD25EZRS-00J99B0, SN# WD-WCAWZ0069198, v.80.00A80
INTERFACE: DEVICE-SDA, HOST-0, BUS-0, TARGET-0, LUN-0



Filesystem Details:


tune2fs 1.40.4 (31-Dec-2007)
Filesystem volume name: NASLite-SE000100
Last mounted on:
Filesystem UUID: a07f18b7-d4d4-4419-8a24-48635e8d5e34
Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53
Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features: has_journal resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
Filesystem flags: signed directory hash
Default mount options: (none)
Filesystem state: clean
Errors behavior: Continue
Filesystem OS type: Linux
Inode count: 36798464
Block count: 73589748
Reserved block count: 0
Free blocks: 72386096
Free inodes: 36798453
First block: 0
Block size: 4096
Fragment size: 4096
Reserved GDT blocks: 1006
Blocks per group: 32768
Fragments per group: 32768
Inodes per group: 16384
Inode blocks per group: 512
Filesystem created: Fri Nov 29 08:38:29 2013
Last mount time: Sat Nov 30 01:55:19 2013
Last write time: Sat Nov 30 02:03:11 2013
Mount count: 3
Maximum mount count: 37
Last checked: Fri Nov 29 08:38:29 2013
Check interval: 15552000 (6 months)
Next check after: Wed May 28 08:38:29 2014
Reserved blocks uid: 0 (user admin)
Reserved blocks gid: 0 (group admin)
First inode: 11
Inode size: 128
Journal inode: 8
Default directory hash: tea
Directory Hash Seed: 30e50e3c-398e-486e-bda1-576b94099a0f
Journal backup: inode blocks

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The investigation continues....

Another member here reported some sucess formatting their 3TB drive outside of NASLite, so I will try that now with a Puppy Linux live-cd. I will delete all partitions so the drive is totally blank - it was not before - I just let NASLite set it up the way it wanted, but there has to be some reason for NL ignoring 2TB of the drive....

I am using the 2.5TB as the boot drive - perhaps that is causing some kind of issue - I have several 2TB ones, so will put one of those in as the system instead, and see if I can add the 2.5TB as a data-only drive.

I'll keep the thread posted on developments.

UPDATE: HDT only sees 2.5TB drive as 280GB too, so if that is what CORE3 thinks is there, that would explain why NL2 also sees the same thing. I would have thought that any modern Linux kernel would know about large capacity drives. Linux was well ahead of Microsoft in that respect, with >2TB being natively supported in Linux kernels from ages ago...

Would it be safe enough to say then, that if the HDT can't see the full capacity of the HDD, then NL2 never will either?

BIOS on the motherboard sees drive capacity as 2500GB, which sounds right.

I will now see what a Puppy Linux live-CD makes of this drive.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Puppy Linux sees drive as 2.27TB, which is about right. Extra partitions on drive in addition to the 276GB one and a 25MB one for NL. I deleted all of them, and applied the changes using Gparted. HDT still only wants to see 276GB of the drive, so the problem would seem to be with the CORE3. As a test, I will now use Puppy to format the 2.5TB drive as ext3, and then I will see what the HDT makes of it, but I am not really that hopeful.

Other users here must be using 2.5TB or 3TB or maybe even 4TB drives in their NL2 setups, so have any of you had issues like this before?

So, Im assuming you didn't format the drive with NL?

NASLite is only going to see the boot partition and the next partition as storage.

NASLite will have no concept of any other partitions past the first 2. Since that *all* a valid NL drive will have.

I would not advise you to format a NL storage drive outside of NL and get the results your expecting.

Okey dokey, full-format of the 2.5TB HDD under Puppy Linux and Gparted. Format complete, and drive mounted in Puppy Linux. Can copy files to the volume in Puppy.

Great.

Delete the test files, so the volume is empty again, power down, plop in HDT CD, boot - only sees 280GB of the 2.5TB.

I am obviously fighting an uphill battle here, as it looks like I have CORE3 against me for some reason, so I am not going to fight NL2 anymore, but being limited to 2TB HDD's was why I was hoping to move away from my Win-XP server. If I am still stuck using HDD's no bigger then 2TB in NL2, then there is not really much point in my using it.

Perhaps no other members are using HDD's >2TB in their builds, but I seriously doubt it...

Until we have a solution to this, I will leave the NL2 server empty.

Hi - thanks for the reply.

YES - I did try formatting and setting up WITHIN NL - that was the very first thing I tried - refuses to see more then 276GB or so of the drive.

Just to be sure, I will put the formatted drive(via Puppy) back in there and try again. Having removed all partitions now(it's all just one big ext3 volume), I might have more luck, but when the HDT is still seeing the formatted ext3 volume as a 280GB volume, which it is not, I would not think that NL2 will either, as it uses the same CORE3 hardware-detection to find things, does it not?

I will make the attempt anyway, and let you know.

I have had a similar issue with my server and it not seeing the drives as the native size of 3TB. I have them hung off of a 3Ware 9550 card to no avail. These are the WD red drives and are advanced format types. They show up as about 750GB drives and nothing I can do fixes this. I also tried the on board SAS controller and the same issue happens. The WD dries are the issue and not linux. They are obviously a nightmare. I also have a 1TB and a 1.5TB Seagate NS series drive in the box and both controllers see them just fine with no issues. WD tells me that there is no issue, a lie, and that it must be may hardware/ OS at fault. There are no tools or other fixes to be had from them so at this point I am in kinda the same boat as you are. I have tried both NASLite and Ubuntu server 64bit with the same result. If you want storage to work in your NASLite box, don't buy WD go Seagate. Lesson learned by me at least. Just wish I knew this before buying 3 of the Fecken things. 9TB of storage gone basically to waste not to mention all my time invested to find out it is WD at the root of the problem.

I know this is not the answer you want to hear but it is what I have found.

Mike

Well bugger me!

I did not bother going past the HDT if it could not see the full 2.5TB.
However, plug the NL2 drive back in, reboot, and it has auto-mounted the drive as a 2.2TB ext3 volume.


However, to make sure everything is now kosher, I have unmounted this disk, rebooted NL2 again, and formatted it from within NL2. It has reported that there are 18631 inode tables to be written, which is much MUCH better then the 2264 it was reporting before.

I guess it is fair to say that I am the instrument of my own problems here, as I did not erase the HDD first. I figured that NL2 would delete everything on the drive, in order to set itself up - that's what was suggested by it saying it will erase everything on the drive. I was unaware that it ignores anything/everything past the 2nd partition...

All up and running fine now.

How come you are so sure it is not Linux at fault? I am not critisising or anything, I am just curious why you seem so sure it is a WD problem...

Assuming you can use a WD drive in any OS, one would assume that it should also be fine in another compatible OS such as Linux.

...but perhaps that is false logic?

I currently have 3x 3TB WD Red's in another server, but that is running Windoze 8 64-bit. For the most part, it is fine, but boy oh boy - the loops I had to jump through to get the fecking networking working - Bill Gates does not make it easy, unless you are willing to do it MS's way!

That is one major advantage of NL2, IMHO - once setup, ANYONE can access it if they know how. If you set up mapped drives on Windoze machines to the NL2 server, you can access these fine, but NL2 does not show up in Network Neighbourhood, which is good, cos it makes NL2 kinda like a hidden network.

...but I digress...

Perhaps you could follow the yellow brick road?
Get a Linux live-CD, delete anything on your red's, and format the whole drive using Gparted or similar, as one big ext3 volume. In my case, using Puppy 4.3.1(which is what I had on hand - might be out of date), the ext3 format took about 45 minutes for the 2.5TB WD Green drive.

That done, maybe NL will see your red's like it then could see my green. Unmounting the puppy-formatted drive, and reformatting from within NL would still be a good idea, I expect, going on what Ralph posted, but PERHAPS that is worth a try? Maybe Gparted's long-format process erases the default advanced format of the drive.

Well, Windows vista, 7 and 8 all work with the advanced format drives so I am not surprised there. This I already knew. The issue is that I am using a hardware RAID card between the OS and the drives. Because the drives are advanced format and the Hadgis WD uses for tech support don't understand nor do they have the experience to help solve the issue. I have not the time nor the inclination to spend days making their drives work where Seagates simply plug and play from the git go. I took a chance on the WD drives and got burned.

This stuff is supposed to be plug and play at this point, the WD stuff isn't. They fail. I will find a use for them but I am no longer buying an more WD drives.

I will be buying Seagate ST4000NM0033 drives in the future. Seagate has far better tech support and their website is decades ahead of WD. They actually have information available there... The mind boggles!

Mike

I hear what you are saying.


Good luck.