Solved: new hard disk is not recognized on internal SATA port
The problem Recently, I consolidated several old, small hard drives in my server onto a single new, large hard drive. The problem was that this drive was not detected on any of the internal SATA ports but worked just fine in an external USB docking station. How can that be? SATA ports and cables are easy to test and were not the culprit. The cable harnesses in my server do not connect to 3.3V because of issues with shucked drives. So, the 3.3V pin should not be the issue here and, indeed, the new drive, a Toshiba MG07ACA, does not use the 3V3 rail at all as the manual states on page 11. So what gives? The solution As it turns out, the disk spins up too slowly! It is not ready when the BOIS/UEFI checks for disks and is therefore ignored once the disk is up to speed and…
rsync backup
Backups with rsync I am currently running an unRAID homeserver to provide data and a few services on my local network. The Synology Diskstation 416 that it replaced, now serves as the backup target.After testing several backup solutions, I think a simple rsync script is enough for what I need. It cannot offer fancy stuff but is a reliable and well tested tool. A few notes on how I came to this conclusion: The backup target (DS 416) is local and set up with disk encryption, so I don’t need a tool with built-in encryption (neither storage, nor transmission). Deduplication is nice to have but in my case reduced the backup size only by a few hundred GB – almost nothing compared to several TB of data. Incremental backups will keep the required disk space low anyway. Hardware function name description backup source homeserver unRAID server with a couple of…