Olimex BAY-HDD-xxxGB

Does the BAY-HDD external disk to LIME and LIME2 Linux computers fit with the HSK enclosure?

The BAY-HDD should work well with the Pioneer Home Server Kit enclosure. From the website: “Pioneer-FreedomBox-HSK supports BAY-HDD/SSD and when assembled the external storage is seen as additional disk.”

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I am now in possession of BAY-HDD generously sent to me by Olimex for testing. I can say first hand that Lime2 works well with the BAY-HDD:

  • BAY-HDD has four holes to match exactly with the four holes that hold the Lime2 board. So, the two metal cases fit well together.
  • There is a SATA port protruding from the BAY-HDD to plug-in exactly into the Lime2 board. The metal case covers that port.
  • The power is provided by the board and no separate power supply is needed.
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Sounds good. So I will order one. Thanx for sharing.

I also ordered the Bay HDD from Olimex. I would like to link my IKIWIKI blog directory to this external disk to save space on the SD card and protect the SD card from too many read and write accesses. Is this possible without any problems or does this limit the functionality of IKIWIKI?

It might be preferable to run the primary OS on the SATA disk instead of the microSD card. I would be interested in the following tests:

Copying the disk image of the microSD card to the SATA disk (e.g. using dd) and making it primary. Then the microSD card can be wiped clean and used for things Samba shares which are infrequently accessed. (Some people got 128 GB microSD cards during Christmas season last year, so the storage isn’t negligible as compared to the SATA disk).

There is a procedure fur the raspberry pi, which includes a tirmwareupgrade. I am afraid that you have to keep the boot partition on the SD on the lime2 board for now. But who knows. Maybe Olimex comes up with a firmware, that allows to boot from sata.
Seems ther is such a thing: https://linux-sunxi.org/Bootable_SPI_flash
But for a good reason, they wrote: “Another concern is the fact that the firmware updater needs to be at least a little bit intelligent and try to prevent the user from doing obviously stupid acts.” Unfortunately I am totally unfit on any coding tasks. I do flash lineage to my phones, but there always is a step by step procedure, and I am normally aware of what each step does.
Would be great tough, and a vast improvement for the great board. Speed and stability wise. At least that’s what they saw on the pi4.

Doing bitwise imaging of btrfs filesystems is something firmly adviced against, though, the btrfs code seems to chop the data if ever seeing two identical filesystem IDs.

But btrfs filesystems should allow to stepover the system to another device.

https://fibrevillage.com/storage/552-how-to-add-or-remove-a-device-to-a-btrfs-file-system

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Do you just use it as extended memory, or did you get the board to boot from HDD/SSD?

In my setup, u-boot (about 1M) was on an SD card. Reset of the OS, including kernel, initrd, Grub, device trees etc, were on all on the HDD. This is using the UEFI images we are about to build [1] [2].

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Sounds promissing. I definitely plan to move the image to a SSD drive, once it is easy enough to geht it running.

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I think we already did the boot from SATA disk experiment a couple of years ago on an older revision of the Lime 2 board. It is worth testing it again on the new rev. K