Quad SATA Kit for Pi4 RAID won't automount at boot

#1

I have successfully built the Pi4 NAS kit, and it is working reasonably well. What I have not been able to do is automount the RAID at boot up. I have searched for answers on the web and found several postings that claimed to be the way to do it. However, any I try causes a boot failure and hang up. My only guess is that the RAID has not loaded and started when fstab is looked at by the boot process, so it hangs. This is contrary to the Raspian documentation that says the external disk (the RAID, in this case) can take up to 90 seconds to be connected. So when I boot up, I use SSH to log in and mount the RAID, and all is well.

I would happily entertain any practical ideas on this issue.

#2

Thanks for sharing. The possible reason is that rockpi-sata.sevice started later than RAID.

#3

Yes, that could be it. So how do I deal with this? How is anyone who has built this kit automounting the RAID?

#4

What software do you use to set up RAID, or can I try it out.

#5

I have tried several different software scenarios with full and lite Raspian, as well as the more automated way of dealing with SAMBA and sharing. What I have now is the most basic with Raspian lite, mdadm and SAMBA installed and configured. I followed the instruction here as best I could. It’s working pretty well as long as I manually mount the RAID after Rockpi is loaded and running.

With it running, it works well, though it’s way too hot to be reliable. The little OLED display at the top freezes after it gets really hot. I’m going to look at upgrading the top fan.

#6

I used mdadm to set up RAID, which can be mounted automatically.

sudo mdadm -C -v /dev/md10 -l 10 -n 4 /dev/sd{a,b,c,d}
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/md10
sudo mdadm --detail --scan | sudo tee -a /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
echo ‘/dev/md10 /mnt/md0 ext4 defaults,nofail,discard 0 0’ | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab
sudo reboot

#7

Thank you for the response. I will try that fourth line setting fstab later today.

#8

Thanks. I used the fstab parameters you showed me and it reboots and runs properly. I will be looking at trying to get the temperature down next.