I dug out a few spare drives recently — four 1TB Seagates — so I figured it was time to kill off the fake NAS sitting on my HP N40L. That one was a Windows spanned volume stitched together from whatever junk was lying around: a 320GB, a 250GB, an 80GB, a whole mess. Now that I’ve got four identical drives, not running RAID would be a waste. So, in the spirit of the almighty “just buy it” ethos, I grabbed an LSI 9211 8i. I skipped the fancy battery-backed RAID 5 cards because I’m broke, which drags down the average and I apologize for that. This is the cheapest HBA out there with documented, confirmed support for the HP N40L. Initial plan: RAID 1, 2TB, holding my FLAC library. I used to download a ton of BDrips. Then I realized they just sat on the disk collecting dust while I watched stuff on Bilibili with my tablet like an idiot. So I’m done with that — music only from now on. 2TB should be plenty. For off-the-shelf NAS systems there’s FreeNAS (BSD-based) and OpenMediaVault (Debian-based). Since I’m an Ubuntu user, I leaned toward OpenMediaVault. So the plan was set: HBA card in, RAID 1, install OpenMediaVault. Perfect. Flawless. …………That’s how it was supposed to go.