Selfhosted

40425 readers

517 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Questions about blade server SSDs [ANSWERED] (kbin.run)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I recently bought a used blade server on the cheap (thank you LabGopher) to upgrade my home set-up and got one in pretty good shape. This is my first foray into blade servers and as I'm in the process of setting it up I'm running into some questions where I'm in a bit over my head trying to figure out.

The server has 4 x 3 TB SAS SSDs. I've installed Ubuntu Server 22.04 just fine. However these four disks show up as a single disk with all the partitions on it. fdisk and similar tools all just show a single sda drive. Furthermore, the total size of that combined disk is shown as 8.4 TB instead of the expected 12 TB.

Clearly I'm running into the 2.1 TB disk formatting limit on each of the four drives independently, but I'm not sure how to proceed. Ubuntu can't even see the missing space. My questions are:

How do I recover my missing 3.6 TB? If I expand the partition to include all free space I just get the 8.4 TB, so it seems like it's a deeper limitation than just the OS, which I don't know how to handle.
How do I get the drives to be individually visible? If I want to set up software RAID I need to have multiple devices accessible, instead of just this conglomerate drive.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] TechAdmin 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sounds like the drives are combined with RAID 5. Could be hardware RAID card or software RAID as part of the BIOS. Server model number can be used to search for administrator manual and may have more info there. If it's hardware RAID card then try to find the model number & search for it's manual. If it's software raid at the BIOS level then motherboard/server manual will cover it. Should be some messages and prompts during boot related to it. Terms to look for 'RAID', 'storage controller', 'Perc', 'LSI'.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You were absolutely right, it was a RAID 5 setup that I had totally overlooked. Thank you! All better now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh duh, that makes sense. I didn't see any software RAID setup but wasn't looking for it specifically in the BIOS. Hardware RAID would also make sense. Thank you for the tips!

[–] blueeggsandyam 1 points 1 year ago

It could be in the bios or have a separate bios for the RAID system. Sometimes you will see it flash on screen as it boots. Like: F6 for RAID configuration