Hey !
I installed FreedomBox on a new Raspberry Pi 4B, and I would like to use it as a local NAS server. So i bought 4 identical 1TB SSDs on Amazon, and they’re working fine.
But when i delete the partitions on my computer* (via AOMEI Partition Assistant), plug the SSDs in the Pi, and try to create a RAID device, it never work.
*I can’t control the 4 disks individually in Cockpit, they are registered under the same drive, with this: Multipathed devices /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd.
Here what happened :
I selected all 4 SSDs
Selected RAID 5
512kb blocks
clicked on creat raid
After a short time, a red message appeared saying : Unable to write partitions : in use (this message change at each attempt but say the same thing basically)
But the RAID device is created despite this.
But when i go to the RAID device, it says : RAID Array Damaged : 1 disk is missing.
And in the disk list, they are all in sync except one in recovery, taking hours and hours then deleting the all RAID array randomly.
If I try to create an RAID with 2 disks (I tried with others disks) the result is the same.
I used to do raid(MD) and lvm, but now that I use freedombox I just put all the drives into the / btrfs filesystem with the raid1 option and I love it.
Don’t use btrfs raid 5 though. Try this through btrfs and I think you will be pleased, but will lose some capacity versus raid 5.
After some manipulations and a lot of errors, I have a 4 1TB disks RAID5, with a disk missing in recovery, giving me a 3TB RAID5, with only 2 disks listed in the disk list, but recognized by Samba.
Hey !
Small update :
I Tried to use the same SSDs as a RAID array under an other OS (Openmediavault on RPi os lite) and I got the exact same result, so I actually think that my SSDs are just bad (I even tried to use them on a USB hub with an external power supply to check if it was a power issue, but same result). idk if you have good recomandations in storage, but i’ll take it !
My freedombox is not powerful so I use low RPM mechanical disks for NAS or video surveillance applications. They work fine. Fast storage is wasted on an Intel atom system.
@Safoxee , thank you for the update. Since you have confirmed that the issue is with hardware not anything in FreedomBox, I am marking this issue as solved.
