Looking For A RAID1 Box

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Help?

I am looking for a box I can drop CentOS or one of the spinoffs that:

Has RAID1 internal (not an external USB RAID thing)
    Can be software or hardware

small (4TB/drive fine) and low power

I plan to use it ONLY for email server.  perhaps iRedMail

I have spent a lot of time looking and not finding any such piece of metal.

All I find are NAS boxes with their own OS.

thanks

Bob (frustrated)

22 thoughts on - Looking For A RAID1 Box

  • It depends on the structure of the drives.  Do you want a dedicated controller card or is an embedded card on the motherboard acceptable?

    Entry Level Dell Poweredge T150 servers could work, or build your own rig with an SLI MegaRAID or HighPoint RocketRAID dedicated controller card.

    There are configurations like this in a Rackmount configuration, tower configurations, or Mini Server configurations, it all depends on what kind of space / budget / environment it is going in.

    Reply back with more details if you want a better answer.

    Chris

    —
    Christopher Wensink IS Administrator Five Star Plastics, Inc
    1339 Continental Drive Eau Claire, WI 54701
    Office: 715-831-1682
    Mobile: 715-563-3112
    Fax: 715-831-6075
    cwensink@five-star-plastics.com http://www.five-star-plastics.com

  • It will go into my rack cabinet so I COULD do a 1U format.

    I would prefer something sitting on a shelf in the rack (next to my QNAP
    NAS) about the size to handle 2 HD and system board.

    Enough memory for CentOS and the mail server software.  Perhaps 2Gb is enough?  4Gb nice to have (anti-virus could eat up memory at times?)

    Oh, has to be Intel not ARM (iRedMail req)

    I don’t need hot swap.  I just did a drive replace on my QNAP and it took ~10min to power down and swap drives.  Took 10hr to mirror to the new drive.

    I DO want it all in the box.  No external drives.

    And I don’t want to build my own hardware.  I want to buy it, install drives, attach boot ISO, and install away.

    Low power like 40W or less good.

    This help?

  • And I am just coming up empty on my searches.

    My search foo has been really off, it seems.

  • Well what I am finding looks like it will be in the +80W range and I am trying to use less electricity.  I would put up with 40W, including drives.

    ITX board most likely?

    And will I end up needing 3 drives or does mirroring the OS partition work.

  • Look at mitxpc.com or search for mini itx barbones PC’s on tigerdirect or newegg or amazon, there are a lot of choices.

    Perhaps this would work:

    https://www.newegg.com/asrock-deskmeet-b660w-b-bb-box-us/p/N82E16856158084
    (must add cpu, ram, drives)

    —
    Christopher Wensink IS Administrator Five Star Plastics, Inc
    1339 Continental Drive Eau Claire, WI 54701
    Office: 715-831-1682
    Mobile: 715-563-3112
    Fax: 715-831-6075
    cwensink@five-star-plastics.com http://www.five-star-plastics.com

  • You might want to consider a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM and a case that will support a couple of 2.5in SSD drives. I’m running one here with postfix, courier-imap, clamav, amavisd, … Mine is in an Argon One case with single 2TB SSD with a PoE Splitter. It’s running the same email software that we run on CentOS and AlmaLinux. Current uptime on out main mail server is 362 days.

    This case has space for 2 2.5in SSD drives.

    https://smile.amazon.com/Geekworm-Raspberry-Storage-Expansion-Compatible/dp/B07VXF2HJG

    Geekworm New NASPi Gemini Dual 2.5” SATA HDD/SSD NAS Storage Kit with DC
    6-18V Wide Voltage Input|Safe Shutdown|Auto Power On|RAID Function for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B(Not Include Raspberry Pi)

    +——————–+
    | Part Price |
    +——————–+
    |RPi4B 8GB $215.00 |
    |Case 70.00 |
    |2SSD 300.00 |
    +——————–+
    |Total $585.00 |
    +——————–+

    Bill

  • After a lot of hours searching, here is what I am coming to….

    3.5″ 2-bay standard built just does not exist these days.  Pretty much everything is at least 4-bay.

    the HP Proliant gen8 looks like a good deal, and only use 2 bays. Some models have RAID1.

    9x9x10 case, not too bad.

    The 1U setups end up being more as they expect them to be used for big servers.

    Or I head over to Microcenter tomorrow (have to go anyway for a few items, 8mi away) and see what we can build.  They have a few 2-bay boxes.

  • Hi Robert,

    my old home server needed to much energy (~80VA) permanently, so I went for an https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3-plus/
    The manufacturer is located in Korea and has dealers around the world. Put it in one of their cases https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h3-case-type-1/ add two drives and you will have a system that consumes less than 20VA under load, less than 15VA idle. My new system is just doing its job, the whole thing will be below 250USD excluding drives.

    Michael

    Tuesday, January 3, 2023, 10:55:40 PM, schriebst Du:

    —

    Michael Schumacher

  • I have a few hardkernels and I was the one that got CentOS-arm working on them and booting completely off the HD.

    Problem comes back to it is ARM.

    I have their Odroid HC4 for doing RAID, but could not get any Linux but theirs installed.

    It is sitting on my desk, unused.

    And as I mentioned, iRedMail does not support ARM.

    So I am looking for something x64ish.

    thanks

  • Proliant gen8 does NOT have UEFI.

    So I think this means I better move up to the gen10…

  • Robert,

    The HC4 should be running with https://www.armbian.com/odroid-hc4/, although this would be Debian based.

    the H3+, just like the complete “H” series is Intel based. The H3+ uses a “Intel(R) Pentium(R) Silver N6005” CPU. I have it running with RHEL9

    Michael

  • I have found a:

    HPE 873830-S01 ProLiant MicroServer Gen10

    for <$300 without drives.  If I can believe the seller, it has a AMD Opteron X3216 Dual-core (2 Core) 1.6GHz and 8GB Installed. It has 4 3.5" bays. and 1? "Media" bay? https://www.servertechsupply.com/873830-s01/

    this could well be acceptable.  Got to find out power draw.  Looks like
    ~40W.

    Any input on issues of OS install?  Do I go with separate OS and data RAID1 sets?

    Also HPE is ClearOS.  I ran ClearOS6 for years before going with QNAP
    turnkey.  Perhaps current ClearOS is better, but it does not handle multi-domain email as I need.  Or it did not.  So I am going to install my own CentOS variant and iRedMail…

    thanks

  • Hi

    I usually do

    [ 1(+n) RAID1 ]->[ LVM ]->[ XFS ]

    then you can use LVM to manage different filesystems as required.

    /boot and/or /boot/efi should be on its own RAID1 with old metadata version but I’m not up to date about how the situation is exactly with EL9.

    Simon

  • Well I just ordered a Proliant gen10+ microserver, as the gen10 of for
    1/2 the price was the $0.59 hamburger (we ad it, but you can’t order it).

    I also ordered 4 Seagate 4T terascale drives (seems nothing smaller around).

    So in some 2 weeks I will have it all together and will see what happens when I do the install.

    :)

    Supposedly there is an internal boot usb port in the gen10+

  • Are you sure that’s still true? I’ve done it that way in the past but it seems at least with EL8 you can put /boot/efi on md raid1 with metadata format 1.0. That way the EFI firmware will see it as two independent FAT
    filesystems. Only thing you have to be sure is that nothing ever writes to these filesystems when Linux is not running, otherwise your /boot/efi md raid will become corrupt.

    Can someone who has this running confirm that it works?

    Thanks, Simon

  • Once upon a time, Simon Matter said:

    Yes, that’s even how RHEL/Fedora set it up currently I believe. But like you say, it only works as long as there’s no other OS on the system and the UEFI firmware itself is never used to change anything on the FS. It’s not entirely clear that most UEFI firmwares would handle a drive failure correctly either (since it’s outside the scope of UEFI), so IIRC
    there’s been some consideration in Fedora of dropping this support.

    And… I’m not sure if GRUB2 handles RAID 1 /boot fully correctly, for things where it writes to the FS (grubenv updates for “savedefault” for example). But, there’s other issues with GRUB2’s FS handling anyway, so this case is probably far down the list.

    I think that having RAID 1 for /boot and/or /boot/efi can be helpful
    (and I’ve set it up, definitely not saying “don’t do that”), but has to be handled with care and possibly (probably?) would need manual intervention to get booting again after a drive failure or replacement.

  • Hi All, very interesting thread, I add my 2 cents point-of-view for free to all of you …

    A lot af satisfaction with HP Proliant MicroServer from the first GEN6 (AMD
    NEON) to the 1-year old MicroServer Gen10 X3216 (CentOS6/7/8) so I think yours is the right choice!

    In /boot/efi/ (mounted from the first partition of the first GPT disk) you only have the grub2 efi binary, not the vmlinuz kernel or initrd image or the grub.cfg itself …

    To be more precise a grub.cfg file exists there but it’s only a static file which has an entry to find the right one using the uuid fingerprint

    *cat \EFI\ubuntu\grub.cfg*search.fs_uuid d9f44ffb-3cb8-4783-8928-0123e5d8a149 root set prefix=($root)’/@/boot/grub’
    configfile $prefix/grub.cfg

    Using an md1 software raid mirror for this FAT32 (ESP) partition is not safe IF you use it outside of the linux environment (because the mirror will became corrupted at the first write the other OSes will do on this partition).

    It’s better to setup a separated /boot partition (yes, here an md1 linux software raid mirror is OK) which the grub2 bootloader can manage correctly
    (be sure grub2 can access his modules to understand and manage this LVM/RAID : mdraid09,mdraid1x,lvm.mod [1] [2]

    insmod raid
    # and load the related `mdraid’ module `mdraid09′ for RAID arrays with version 0.9 metadata, and `mdraid1x’ for arrays with version 1.x metadata.
    insmod mdraid09
    set root=(md0p1)
    # or the following for an unpartitioned RAID array
    set root=(md0)

    IMHO installing ex-novo is the easiest path with setup that puts all the things correctly, building the right initramfs and putting the correct entry in grub.cfg for the modules needed to manage raid/lvm… To be honest I don’t know how the anaconda installer manage the /dev/sda1
    ESP/FAT32/EFI partitions (I’d like it clones this efi partition to the 2nd disk, but i think it will leave /dev/sdb1 partition empty)

    To understand better how GRUB2 works i’ve looked here : [3] [4] [5]

    Happy hacking

    *Fleur*

    [1] : https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/187236/grub2-lvm2-raid1-boot
    [2] : https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GRUB/Advanced_storage
    [3] : https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/grub.html
    [4] :
    https://documentation.suse.com/sled/15-SP4/html/SLED-all/cha-grub2.html
    [5] : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB