It looks like the motherboard shares some PCIe and/or SATA lanes between
SATA ports and M.2 ports, so you must be careful with your choices.?? I
suggest installing an M.2 PCIe x4 SSD into slot M.2_1 and configuring it
for "PCIE mode", so that it works and all 6 SATA ports work.?? You will
want to use EUFI mode and GPT when installing Debian.
Based on this, and a full sized manual printout, I've ordered a 2T WD
Black, supposedly a 2280 device. $100.
Question, when I put this in, what happens to the 32GB of dimms? How does
this fit into the architecture? I assume this isn't volatile but is quick
storage.
The DIMM slots are different from the M.2 slots. The M.2 slots
are small PCIe interfaces; the installation procedure is to
insert the 2280 (22mm x 80mm) card at a slight upward angle,
then press it down and screw it in. It may ship with a glued-on
heat spreader or tiny radiator; if so, use it, don't peel it
off.
Note that it should appear as /dev/nvme0n1 or similar, rather
than /dev/sda. Partitions will be /dev/nvme0n1p1, p2...
The NVM bits stands for non-volatile memory; it's an SSD with a
different interface.
I propose to put this in as suggested, which should leave all 6 sata-III's
available, Install bookworm to it, w/o the current ectra controller get it
going, then put 3 of the 2T gigastones on sata1-2-3, use the bios to make a
raid5 of them and mount it as /home, prove it works with some throw away
stuff, then plug the existing raid10 controller & mount it as moi, then
format the raid5 again with gparted,
You should use mdadm rather than a BIOS RAID system -- better
recovery to other systems, more understandable error messages,
better support for fixing things that might go wrong.
If the new drives are sda through sdf something like this is what
you want:
mdadm --create /dev/md/gsmoi5 -l raid5 -n 3 /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc
mkfs.ext4 /dev/md/gsmoi5
mount /dev/md/gsmoi5 /home
and for your second set:
mdadm --create /dev/md/gsamanda5 -l raid5 -n 3 /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf
mkfs.ext4 /dev/md/gsamanda5
mount /dev/md/gsamanda5 /amanda
Suggestions re other, more recent solutions will be accepted and studied.
Definitely must support backing up other machines of varying architectures
on my local network. In addition to a 4 pack of linux running wintel stuff,
there's the potential for 5 or so arms too. Gcodes for 3d printers are all
unrolled loops and bulky as can be.
The most flexible backup systems are the hardest to configure,
but nothing is much worse than amanda.
You might like borg. Borg is in Debian as 'borgbackup'.
In the other direction, using rsnapshot over ssh is relatively
simple and comes with the distinct advantage over both amanda
and borg that the backups are stored as normal files in a normal
filesystem, so recovery from an accidental deletion of a file or
directory is very straightforward.