Thecus N5200 as a Server

Back in 2007, I bought a Thecus N5200 to use as bulk storage on my network. I’ve spent many years using and fighting with the unit but it wasn’t until my storage needs out grew the 5 SATA disks it could hold that I considering sending it off to be recycled.

It’s a pretty basic unit. From Thecus it arrived with 5 hot swap SATA disk trays and a simple web-based management interface. The interface wasn’t great at telling you exactly what the state of your disks were so I lost my data with this unit more than once. Over time though Thecus added a method to install add ons and little by little people started to write add ons for the unit and actually increased its feature set.… Click here to read more!

Thecus: Dead again….

You would think I’d have learned my lesson already. I’ve been using my Thecus N5200 for a while now and, like clockwork, every 6 months it just dies. I’ve blogged about it before here, a lot, here are some of the posts.

Briefly, I had the drive in bay 1 fail again. It’s always that drive. No errors on the disk the Thecus just looses it. No errors in the logs, no bad sectors, it just disappears. So, I pull the drive out, format it, test it and put it back in. I log into the interface, tell the Thecus to use the disk I just put in as a spare which causes it to rebuild the array.… Click here to read more!

Thecus N5200 Failure…. Again

Wow, this is getting old. 36 days in and I’ve had another drive fail.. only not really. Sure the N5200 thinks it’s failed but if I pull the disk out and pop in back in, the array rebuilds and all is well. The logs show no errors on the drive, no bad reads or writes, it just disappears. What a wonderful device it is….

Also, even though the email test functions work the N5200 still does not send me email when something like this happens. I still have to log in every few days and check manually. Very nice….

Toplakr

Followup: Thecus N5200 – Perfect in Failure

Right, so 56 days after the massive failure I have another degraded RAID on my hands. This time I didn’t get any emails to tell me about it. Not sure why, I’ll assume the email part is my fault to give Thecus the benefit of the doubt…

I happened to load up the admin website for the device as I’ve gotten into the habit of doing and noticed the Array was degraded. I took a look at the disks and drive 5 was missing. Strange… I took a look at the logs and it showed the array going into a degraded mode but no mention of the drive falling off of the face of the earth.… Click here to read more!

Update: Thecus N5200 – RAID Repair

Well, I have to admit: I am one lucky guy. I have been running a truly degraded RAID array since day one of my experience with the N5200. To get up to speed you may want to read my other post about the device: Thecus N5200 Review

So, today my replacement hard drive arrived for a failure I noticed recently. I took a look at the RAID and double checked the reason for the replacement. My #2 drive was showing some bad sectors and was listed as a ‘warning’. Not a failed drive but a drive on the way. Better safe then sorry I thought.… Click here to read more!

Followup: Thecus N5200

Well, I have my first real drive failure on my hands. The array has been running for a few months now (though not without issue), and when I logged into it the other day I noticed I have a drive on the fritz. The array did not send me an email telling me about the issue but that could be understandable as the array is not currently degraded, I just have a drive with a few errors. I will place an order for a new disk and go through the process of replacing it. The manual says all I need to do is pull the bad drive and pop in a new good one.… Click here to read more!

Review: Thecus N5200

I’ve had this device for about 6 weeks now and at this point I think I’m ready to post a fair review. The Thecus N5200 is essentially a NAS RAID box. It’s built around a Intel Celeron 600Mhz chip and runs linux. It holds 5 SATA drives up to 750GB which was is the largest available when I bought the unit (It may have been updated to support larger drives by now). Not being a glutton I installed 5 500GB drives in a RAID 5 giving me about 2TB of storage once it is all is setup. Unfortunatly one of my drives was faulty on arrival though so I had to do a bit of extra waiting before I could really start to use the unit.… Click here to read more!

Bash Script – Restarting OpenVPN Connections

I use Sanoid, and Syncoid, to take snapshots of my Centos based ZFS storage system and copy them to replicas. Generally speaking, I use re-purposed Thecus N5550 storage units for the remote hardware. I have a long history with Thecus hardware, and while I’m not a fan of their software, I am a big fan of removing it and installing Linux. I usually take out the 2GB of memory it comes with, and swap it for a pair of 4GB modules. The only down side, especially for systems I install in remote locations, is that I don’t have any out of band management.… Click here to read more!

Behringer X-Live – Splitting 32 Channel WAV Files and Deleting Silence

*** Work on this continues over on GitHub: https://github.com/Topslakr/x32Live-CleanUp ***

At my church we use a Behringer X32 mixer to run Sunday services and we added an X-Live card, instead of the included USB Audio interface card, so we can record our services, multi-tracked, direct to an SD card. This has saved a lot of recording overhead, since we don’t need a PC, display, etc., but it’s also created some hassles.

The X-Live card works great, but it does lack some flexibility we’d like. For instance, you can record 8/16/32 channels off the board but you can’t really pick which ones.… Click here to read more!

Install Centos 6 on a Non-PAE Machine

I have a Thecus N5200 that was modified to have a VGA port. Though the machine will run a variety of current Linux distributions, I wanted it to run Centos 6. Unfortunately, the N5200 doesn’t support PAE, which Centos 6 requires.

The first major problem is that a Non-PAE machine won’t even boot the Centos installer CD/DVD. You have to find some way around that. There are several ways to get around that but they are all quite complex and time-consuming. Plus, as time goes on they work less and less. The old software needed is harder and harder to find.… Click here to read more!