Lenovo PX4-400D NAS no drives dropped to $99 w free shipping

[mikeford]

I made a thread to put support issues in, https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/help-for-old-lenovo-emc-nas-units-ix2-px4-etc.2609187/

These are no longer supported by Lenovo, the main software EMC was sold off to Dell, which will not be supporting old Lenovo stuff either. Several threads with lots more detail in different parts of this forum, more I expect to come. Bought my second one with this price drop this morning, my first one is running fine, but I want to play with this second one and see if I can put updated linux based software on it, see threads in other places related to that.

Intel Atom D2701 Dual Core 2.13GHz , HDMI and USB on the back, and some indications expansion possible. As of my purchase 112 left in stock.

Lenovo EMC PX4-400D Network Storage 0TB Diskless SM10G78650

Lenovo EMC PX4-400D Network Storage Diskless EU/UK. High performance business class NAS and iSCSI network storage. powered by Lenovo EMC techology.

www.parallelminer.com

 

[killster1]

These are no longer supported by Lenovo, the main software EMC was sold off to Dell, which will not be supporting old Lenovo stuff either. Several threads with lots more detail in different parts of this forum, more I expect to come. Bought my second one with this price drop this morning, my first one is running fine, but I want to play with this second one and see if I can put updated linux based software on it, see threads in other places related to that.

Intel Atom D2701 Dual Core 2.13GHz , HDMI and USB on the back, and some indications expansion possible. As of my purchase 112 left in stock.

Lenovo EMC PX4-400D Network Storage 0TB Diskless SM10G78650

Lenovo EMC PX4-400D Network Storage Diskless EU/UK. High performance business class NAS and iSCSI network storage. powered by Lenovo EMC techology.

www.parallelminer.com

well well well, going to be hard to resist these, they go full speed unlike the other 17$ nas right?
i watched a youtube video of the Px2-300D where they upgraded the ddr3 inside. It has 1xusb3.0 plug and dual gigabit, i think ill take one or two of them. Thanks

 

[PrinceXizor]

well well well, going to be hard to resist these, they go full speed unlike the other 17$ nas right?
i watched a youtube video of the Px2-300D where they upgraded the ddr3 inside. It has 1xusb3.0 plug and dual gigabit, i think ill take one or two of them. Thanks

How hard is this to roll at home? Never done more than share a drive hosted on my regular rig.

 

[mikeford]

Its storage that once setup any device that can reach it on your network can access limited by drive and network speeds just as if it was local to the device. Personally I MUCH prefer using a NAS to sharing folders on each PC.

Key to making this a deal, or a good idea, is that you have to wisely source the usually matching set of drives, which even for refurbs will be several times the cost of the bare unit. New drives are a lot more expensive than used, used need to be purchased carefully and fully tested.

Once you have drives the install only takes maybe 20 min, maybe an hour to slowly go over the manual and setup, then it runs some updates, and you are good to go.

These are NOS, new old stock, made about 7 years ago, with nothing from Lenovo except some files to download, and 30 days warranty from the vendor.

 

[BenJeremy]

These are excellent units. I have one... 4x8TB drives, in RAID-0 for 32TB of space. I do not think there is a practical limit in the PX units, unlike the IX units (which are limited to 16TB max usable space on a volume) - so you should be able to load them up with 18TB drives, even.

 

[PrinceXizor]

Key to making this a deal, or a good idea, is that you have to wisely source the usually matching set of drives

Do these take special drives then due to firmware or something? Or just the literal cost of sourcing high capacity drives?
I'm not doing a lot of video streaming and have no plans to get into that but I would like a central repository for backups, pictures and to have a more organized backup strategy than I have right now plus, like you said, eliminating the open hole of "sharing" anything from a particular computer. This will be the first time since we've been married that we will have two separate computers so it seems like a good time to grow my networking skills.

 

[BenJeremy]

Do these take special drives then due to firmware or something? Or just the literal cost of sourcing high capacity drives?
I'm not doing a lot of video streaming and have no plans to get into that but I would like a central repository for backups, pictures and to have a more organized backup strategy than I have right now plus, like you said, eliminating the open hole of "sharing" anything from a particular computer. This will be the first time since we've been married that we will have two separate computers so it seems like a good time to grow my networking skills.

I've dropped all sorts of drives, and even mismatched brands (as long as size was same). They just need to be SATA drives... but a couple of things: First, don't use drives known to get hot. Some have mentioned cooling issues with these units, and there are mods to crank the fans in them, and second, I recommend, for those on a budget, Hitachi server pulls off of eBay.

It's strange to recommend heavily used drives, but bad drives tend to go quickly... a (reliable brand) drive that has 20k hours on a server farm will probably run for another 100k hours without a hiccup. Hitachi is easily the most reliable brand for platter drives.

 

[PrinceXizor]

These seem like a good deal despite the EOL...but...I don't really have the GigE infrastructure in place to make this workable. FOMO is real, but, I'm going to have to wait until I'm done building my new rig to tackle the backup/network situation.

 

[SamirD]

How much better are these than the ix2? At $34 shipped my ix2 was a no-brainer, but I had to modify it for the fan to be fast enough to cool my exos drive in it and the write speeds basically top out at what the old intel ss4200-e would do--about 30MB/sec max, even using rsync. (Took 2.5 days to sync 2.7GB of data from a netgear readynas that transfers nearly full gigabit 100MB/sec.)

 

[killster1]

How much better are these than the ix2? At $34 shipped my ix2 was a no-brainer, but I had to modify it for the fan to be fast enough to cool my exos drive in it and the write speeds basically top out at what the old intel ss4200-e would do--about 30MB/sec max, even using rsync. (Took 2.5 days to sync 2.7GB of data from a netgear readynas that transfers nearly full gigabit 100MB/sec.)

2.7gb or 2.7tb 30mb/s is way to slow for me, even 100MB/s is slow but i could live with it.

 

[SamirD]

2.7gb or 2.7tb 30mb/s is way to slow for me, even 100MB/s is slow but i could live with it.

haha, yeah meant TB. My how sizes of stuff have grown in the last 2 decades--I still remember when 100MB was big.

Reading is actually much faster at 70MB/s+, but the write is still really slow considering it is many years newer than the Intel ss4200-e which uses a much earlier version of the software.

 

[mikeford]

The IX line was consumer, the PX business with close to 4x the original cost. The IX2 are so cheap getting at least one I think is a no brainer, but $99 gets you the D2701 atom, memory that can be easily expanded, and most of all 4 bays, which I see as the minimum for raid5. Which or how many to get depends on what you need.

My first IX2 is pushing 6 years of 24/7, fairly light home network use. I bought a second one as a mirror and hot spare for the first one. Thinking about expanding my storage I then bought a PX4-400d, and a second one when the price dropped again. The second PX4 I'm going to take apart and look at expansions and updating to a newer version of linux and NAS software. If it goes well I will do the same to the first unit.

PX4-400d has 2x 1Gbe, should both be plugged into my network? At the router or is at a switch just as good?

 

[SamirD]

Thank you for the details! How much of a difference in build quality do you find between the ix line and the px line?

As far as the two gigabit ports, each will get an IP address so you can hit either one to get to the nas. But this is almost pointless on the same network. It was really designed for serving two separate physical lans with the same device, unless the px has some lan aggregation features.

The one thing that has me quite curious is if you can put a 10Gbps adapter in that slot that seems to be there, and if connecting a monitor allows you to see the boot screen and hook up a keyboard and mouse. I also am wondering if that esata can be used to expand a volume or if it just has to be its own volume or is only for external devices.

 

[mikeford]

From another non official site, the slot is X11 SFF PCI, limiting factor may be bios support. Maybe the USB 3.0 might support a 2.5Gbe?

Build quality is a harder call, to me its features and market, ix is consumer with external power supply, px is business with internal, both are a good step above average consumer grade NAS units of that era. Both are on my desk, PX4 shows cpu 104F, IX2 shows 150F, system temps were i think 95F and 125F, could be a factor.

 

[SamirD]

As long as it is a pcie slot, I think as long as the firmware supports the nic, it should work. At least that's the way it was on the ancestor, the Intel ss4200-e. I was able to actually add a second nic and manually activate it and it worked fine. Dual nic support was pulled on the unit before it went into production and the motherboard has a spot for the extra nic chip and port. The software had some scripts to detect a second nic, but I don't know unix/linux so I didn't know how to get that working but was able to find out how to manually turn the nic 'on' and it worked. If any of this is still in the current codebase, I bet a nic that uses the same universal driver set would work. I know realtek has unified their 2.5Gb and 1Gb driver base, so if it runs a current nic driver, it might automatically work with 2.5Gb, but I think it would be more likely to work with a 10Gb since those are older.

To me, the build quality tells you right away who something was made for. Like the Netgear Readynas Ultra 6--this thing is no consumer nas even though it was marketed as such. The whole thing is solid metal and uses the same caddies as the rackmount Readynas units.

This is kinda what I was wondering about--was the px built for business vs just given business features? If it was built for business, there's probably some tricks still up its sleeve. If it wasn't, it's just going to be an extension of the consumer line.

Those temps are much better, that's for sure. All my other nas units have temps like the px4, whereas the ix2 was initially much higher like what you're seeing. I was not comfortable with that at all, so I kept my ix2 on a powerline unit to limit the bandwidth and used it sparingly until I found a fan mod, which is very simply--pull the blue pwm pin to make the fan run 100%. So now instead of 800rpm, it's nearly 3600rpm and my cpu is <140F now. I could care less about noise as I'm not even 100ft close to it, but I don't want it cooking my expensive exos drives.

 

[mikeford]

Poking around in the settings I see three options for write cache, disable, enable with UPS, and always enable. Looks like I am shopping for a low cost good quality low power UPS.

I've got some work to do, but my "reward" for getting it done is to open up the PX4 I just bought and take some pictures and make some notes, then start on potential mods. A faster NIC seems a bit too expensive for my use, 2.5Gbe cards were $90 on ebay, same for USB adapters. Maxing out ram and enabling cache maybe more practical.

 

[SamirD]

I know the UPS option on the ix2 never really worked from what I read online. You can get a UPS for it, but don't expect it to interface properly with the px4 if the software is the same as the ix2.

Definitely work on the ram first. Every nas I have that has memory expansion capability immediately benefits from more ram.

And if you look hard enough you should be able to find a set of 10Gbps sfp+ cards with a dac cable for around $60 shipped. This should give you the ability to really see what the px4 can do.

 

[mikeford]

Are you talking about optical fiber cables? Maybe, but until I open it up its wild guesses as to what might work.

I think stock it has two ram slots, with just one used with a 2GB stick.

IIRC the ix2, px4-300, and px4-400 are all different processors, so may not have that much in common.

 

[SamirD]

Yep, the 10Gbps cards designed for fibre optics, but that can be used with a Direct Attach Copper cable (DAC) instead. It's actually going to be more dependent on the software driver support more than anything. If you have to add drivers to the kernal, etc, it's going to be a lot of trouble. Unless you switch to another platform that has support, then you'll be golden. Or you get cards that work native.

2x ram slots is awesome! If it's ddr3, I bet you could load it up with 16GB no problem. If it's ddr2, you still can manage 4GB.

Yep, I would expect them to have different processors, but if the software is just x86, they'll keep the same code between all of them, hence the same compatibility, but also the same limitations/bugs.

 

[mikeford]

From the description at PM,

Memory

2GB DDR3

Also now showing 101 in stock, down I think 30 from a week ago.

16GB and it normally runs in 2GB, so potentially a 14GB ram disc, then enable write caching with a UPS, could speed it up some.

Comment on reddit RE the PX4
"I just finished building two of them. One with 44TB and 500GB NVMe cache running on UnRAID. I am working on a write up on the process to post soon. "
Very interesting eh?

 

[SamirD]

Yep, definitely has potential. Link to the reddit thread? I'd love to read more about these.

 

[mikeford]

Linking not working, its near the top of r/datahoarder

 

[SamirD]

Linking not working, its near the top of r/datahoarder

Found it. Too bad there wasn't much info on the build yet.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You can run unRAID on the PX4? Now things are getting veeery interesting.

 

[mikeford]

Tripplite internet350u arrived the other day, Win10 64 pc immediately detected, and at least shows status of battery etc. Plugged it into the PX4 and the UPS widget did not detect it.

Tripplite has free software, linkalert, something like that, not sure what is wrong, maybe install related, but not a good time to be turning stuff off or rebooting, so testing has to wait.