TL;DR at the end
Some backstory
Before the pandemic started, my friend used to work for an IT outsourcing company, and had a large storage unit of old junk that he got for free from work and I was free to grab anything to rescue it from going into recycling. I grabbed a lot of things, and one of things I grabbed was this big heavy thing with rack rails and everything and was just missing the drives:
What is it exactly? Its an iSCSI appliance from Buffalo! The full name is “TeraStation III iSCSI Rackmount TS-RIXL/R5” and it was meant to be used as an iSCSI appliance or a NAS for a small bussiness and to be used with Windows Server 2003/2008. Buffalo also released TS-RXL/R5 which is literally the same exact thing but it just can’t do iSCSI in the firmware. It has single core 800MHz marvell CPU, 4x SATA II bays, 3x USB 2.0 and 512MB RAM. Also a fancy display. My Synology NAS has same specs and runs fine, it should be fiiiiine, right?
Is this a guide? Not really. Is this a blog about how to reuse old technology and affirm you don’t have a crippling hoarding problem of old enterprise hardware? Hell yeah.
Also for some unholy reason, these things still go for $250+ on eBay.
Obsolete FW? Into the stranger-danger VLAN you go!
Seeing as this is a device from 10 years ago and the last thing listed supporting is Windows 7, you can imagine how old the firmware might be, and you definitely don’t want that thing on your primary network.
Now to even install the firmware onto it after replacing all drives, you have to sacrifice a goat populate all bays with the same size of disk and force the updater application into a special debug mode that will allow you to flash it, because Buffalo doesn’t want you to replace the drives, which is also apparent by warranty stickers on all screw holes for the drive caddies. After flashing it, you also have to change the language from Japanese to English.
Now, the web interface is horrible, probably has more security holes than a swiss cheese and it only supports SMBv1. Unless you run a retro homelab, you can’t really use this.
Modernize it by sprinkling some Linux onto it
Not many people are aware of this, but someone actually created a Debian 10 installer for old and new Buffalo NASes with the required documentation, so you can actually run modern Linux on this thing.
haha oh no its ancient arm5
What can you actually use this thing for? Memes.
Straight up don’t expect it to be anything other than a file server. I couldn’t get it to install OpenMediaVault without bricking the entire install and I installed Nextcloud to see how horribly it would run. It took 5 minutes just to login with CPU at full tilt.
Anyway as I was playing with it I made a custom display thingy for it to show stats, so you can use it if you have one of these devices.
Actually using it as a storage server
With Debian 10 on it, I installed the drives into it and tried to use it as a NAS, but I was getting terrible performance for some reason. Decided to pull all of the drives and tried to see how it performs with a single Western Digital Caviar Green WDC WD5000AACS-00ZUB0 from 2013 as that was the only spare drive I had left, making sure its not the software raid that’s killing the performance. Sorry no NFS benchmark, Windows did not like it.
Regular old Samba 3 with CPU being fully maxed out all the time during file transfers
iSCSI with Linux SCSI target framework (tgt) with CPU being fully maxed out all the time during file transfers
iSCSI with Linux-IO (LIO) where the CPU sits at around 80% during file transfers
The average read is 64.7mb/s and average write is 62.9 mb/s for this WD green drive when testing it in usb3 enclosure.
And as a bonus for sanity checking, performance from iSCSI from a LUN on Synology DS215j with 2x SMR WD Reds in Synology Hybrid Raid around 75% used
The CPU also sat at around 80% during file transfers when monitoring the panel in Synology’s control panel.
Seems like Linux-IO (LIO) is best for storage solution for this hardware, and you’re really better off using something else as a Samba/NFS server as itself it can’t handle the load.
There’s also something terrible with LIO that made me angry after trying to figure out where my config went after reboot. if you don’t enable the service to run on boot, it wipes the config on next boot. Debian Buster also does not have a service to enable it on boot, so you have to create one yourself, and this issue is listed NOWHERE in the Debian docs for LIO. 957041 – targetcli does not restore configuration after reboot. “Its not a bug, its a FEATURE!”
Conclusion ala TL;DR
Can it be done? Yes. Is it worth it? Nooooooooo.
Unless you can get it for super cheap with the caddys or for free, don’t even bother seeking out this thing or purchasing it.
The original FW is super obsolete, and even with running Debian 10, the performance of file transfers is not great, unless you use it as a LIO iSCSI server, which itself has its own problems. It’s also loud, but you can fix that by replacing the two fans with noctuas to make it quiet and still keep it cool after hammering it with stress-ng.
Don’t buy it, but play with it and use it if you get it for free or super cheap.