Home Server with RAID 1 SATA M2 SSDs

[runyor]

I have been using a Raspberry Pi Model B as a home server for a decade now. Mainly as an http/cronjob server, it has never failed on me (did a SD card upgrade at some point for additional disk space). Backup was just a couple of SDs ready to replace the failing one.



Now I need more CPU power so I got myself a RockPro64 4GB and plan to setup it with two M2 SSDs in RAID 1.



My current inventory:

- board

- 60W power adapter

- PCIE to M2 SATA adapter (two slots) based on the JMB582 chip



Items I am waiting for:

- heat sink (forgot to order it with the board)

- serial to usb adapter (because apparently you cannot install Debian without it as video fails: https://youtu.be/dENsLmDhq5Y)

- 2x SATA SSDs (1TB each)



Tried installing Debian 12 but (as per the linked YouTube video) I think I got this https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64#N..._on_Debian so now I need something to hook up to the uart (please let me know if I am wrong on this).



Manjaro worked great and I was able to at least confirm the SATA adapter is loaded fine:
$ lspci
00:00.0 PCI bridge: Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd RK3399 PCI Express Root Port
01:00.0 SATA controller: Micron Technology Corp. JMB58x AHCI SATA controller

[diederik]

Tried installing Debian 12 but (as per the linked YouTube video) I think I got this https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64#N..._on_Debian so now I need something to hook up to the uart (please let me know if I am wrong on this).

Why not SSH into the RP64 and run the command?

[runyor]

Tried installing Debian 12 but (as per the linked YouTube video) I think I got this https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64#N..._on_Debian so now I need something to hook up to the uart (please let me know if I am wrong on this).

Why not SSH into the RP64 and run the command?

I assumed the DHCP client is not enabled by default on the Debian installer as the board did not show up on my router's devices list.

[AnjinMeili]

What is the symptoms of your issue? Can you step by step what you have done so far? Which image? Booting from eMMC or SD?

[ChriChri]

For your setup you might find useful information here:

https://git.sr.ht/~chrichri/RockPro64_u-...RAID_howto

If your SATA controller is supported by u-boot you could finish your setup without serial console, but I'd strongly advice to be ready for failure in which case debugging via serial would be needed. Reverting to a boot from sdcard/eMMC works without serial console by disabling SPI via jumper.

[wdt]

Not worth setting up another account.....
Flash sector size 0x2000 ..... is this a typo? maybe 0x200?

[ChriChri]

Not worth setting up another account.....
Flash sector size  0x2000  ..... is this a typo?  maybe 0x200?

Hm, I'm not really into that topic, but it seems that sectors used for erasing can be quiet big. Information from the SPIs data sheet (wiki) point to a size of 4096byte, but the page https://github.com/sbabic/libubootenv/bl..._config.md says it can be left out.

A quick test reveals that indeed the commands fw_* work without that parameter. I'll take it out off the howto.

[wdt]

0x2000 = 8K ,, this seems too low (small) for an erase block size, which is usually 64K or larger
Nowadays often 256K,, but this is NOR flash so it could be different
-----
and after looking at the examples I think that it is indeed erase block size,, just mislabled