LaCie 2BIG NAS needs a new OPSYS: Help?

K

KenGordon

OK. I have this rather old NAS, a LaCie 2BIG NAS with 2 ea 2 TB HDs in it. I just recently replaced one of those drives.

Anyway, LaCie's NAS's used an operating system (OPSYS) from Seagate, NAS OS 4, but Seagate will no longer support it after Jan 2022.

I have another NAS now, a Qnap job, so I am not particularly worried about losing data: I won't

But I thought that if I could change the software in the NAS to something else, preferably something FreeBSD based, I could continue to use my hardware as a backup of my backups.

As I mentioned above, the original OPSYS for this NAS is Linux based, and named NAS OS 4. I know nothing about this software.

Any ideas or suggestions?

I have never liked to throw anything away that still works.

Ken Gordon W7EKB
 
A tiny bit of internet search shows that the LaCie NAS probably has a 64-bit Intel Atom CPU. See below, it is likely an ARMv5. Likely it is a standard PC-like architecture, with SATA and Ethernet ports, with the OS installed probably on one (or both) of the two disks, and the BIOS configured to boot from whatever disk is active and present. If that's the case, you can probably install any standard OS on it, including FreeBSD. The biggest stumbling blocks are likely: how to get the machine to start the boot process, and how to interact with it while installing. For the first part, it probably does not have a normal open BIOS, which will boot from USB sticks, and the BIOS is probably not configurable. Here's one way to start the install: Take one of the disks, connect it to another computer, and copy the FreeBSD install image to it (directly, not onto a partition), and wipe the other disk (overwrite it with zeroes). Put them back into the NAS, and when you power it up, it should boot from the install disk, which will begin running the installer.

The second problem may be harder: To run a normal install, you need to install a keyboard and monitor to the machine, or configure the BIOS to use a serial console and attach one (hard). If there is no monitor output to be found, here's an alternate solution: Find a spare machine of the same architecture (probably 64-bit Intel), temporarily attach the disks to the spare machine, perform the OS install there. Then connect the bootable disks to the NAS, and hope for the best. But a quick internet search shows people opening up a LaCie box, and finding a VGA and USB connector, so you're probably good to go.
 
Good. Thanks for the reply and the suggestions. I'll open the box up and take a close look at what is there. As far as an interface to the box, I am thinking of some sort of web-based software. I used to manage the box with a browser. It has (had?) a standard IP address and I just used Firefox to work with it.

I think this will be fun. :)

I'll report what happens here. Thanks again,

Ken Gordon
 
So now you are left wondering. Do I scrap it or try and shoehorn another board....

I have some Buffalo TerraStations that served me well but now linger...

With 4bay Mini-Tower NAS cases available for cheap I think we both know the answer.
 
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