Table of Contents
Disks must be added before they can be formatted and mounted or configured in a RAID array.
All disks that you wish to configure in XigmaNAS should ideally be connected when XigmaNAS boots up, although external USB drives may be connected once XigmaNAS is running.
The High-Level process flow for configuring a visible share in XigmaNAS is:
- Add Disks
- Format Disks (if required) in UFS filesystem
- Add Mount Point
- Enable Services (CIFS, FTP, etc.)
To remove a disk, you must delete the Mount Point first and remove the disk after.
Adding a disk or CD/DVD drive
To add a disk, open the Disks/Management page and click the 
on the right hand side of the Display area
In the drop down, select a disk drive. In this example, we will select ada1.
FOR TWO PARTITION HARD DRIVE INSTALLATIONS, where you want to share the capacity of a single hard drive between XigmaNAS and storage, you can add the XigmaNAS boot drive (ada0 in this example)
For information about the Hard Disk Standby Time, Advanced Power Management and Acoustic Level setting, please refer to section 5.4. For the moment, leave these as default.
For the ‘Preformatted FS”: Leave it as default for new disk, or set it to NTFS/EXT2 or FAT32 for existing disk. Anyway, it’s an information field that don’t impact the comportment of XigmaNAS.
Click the Add button. Continue to add additional disks as required. The Disk/s should appear in the table and the Status should show ONLINE as illustrated below.
Click the Apply Changes button and if successful, the following message will be displayed.
Formatting a Disk
For two partition hard drive installations, where you want to share the capacity of a single hard drive between XigmaNAS and storage, you do not have to format the disk, this was already done for you back in the console setup. The storage partition is already formatted as UFS.
Click on the Disks/Format page and in the dropdown; select the drive you want to format.
In this example we will configure the disk for normal use using the native FreeBSD UFS filesystem.
Leave the File system setting as UFS (GPT and Soft Updates) and leave the minimum free space at the default value.
In the Display area, information similar to the following should be displayed. The amount of data and the content will different in your case.
Erasing MBR and all partitions. Destroying old GPT information: Creating GPT partition: /dev/ada1p1 added Creating filesystem with 'Soft Updates': /dev/ad1ap1: 100.0MB (204732 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048 using 4 cylinder groups of 25.00MB, 1600 blks, 3200 inodes. with soft updates super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at: 160, 376512, 752864, 1129216, 1505568, 1881920, 2258272, 2634624, 3010976, 3387328, 3763680, 4140032, 4516384, 4892736, 5269088, 5645440, 6021792, 6398144, 6774496, 7150848, 7527200, 7903552, 8279904, 8656256, 9032608, 9408960, 9785312, 10161664, 10538016, 10914368, 11290720, 11667072, 12043424, 12419776, 12796128, 13172480, 13548832, 13925184, 14301536, 14677888, <= TEXT REMOVED => 813296832, 813673184, 814049536, 814425888, 814802240, 815178592, 815554944, 815931296, 816307648, 816684000, 817060352, 817436704, 817813056, 818189408, 818565760, 818942112, 819318464, 819694816, 820071168, 820447520, 820823872, 1045506016, 1045882368, 1046258720, 1046635072, 1047011424, 1047387776, 1047764128, 1048140480, 1048516832 Done!
If you have previously added other disks, then select the additional disks and format them as well, if required.
Mounting a disk
Once a disk is formatted it needs to be mounted before it can be used.
Go to the Disks/Mount Point page and Click the on the right hand side and in the Disk drop down, select the drive that you previously added and formatted (Raid5 in this example).
| Partition | Description |
|---|---|
| EFI GPT | It's the default XigmaNAS method when initializing a drive. This method permits support for volumes bigger than 2TB. |
| 1 | For MBR partition n°1 or for software RAID array (created with XigmaNAS release newer than the 0.68) |
| 2 | For MBR partition n°2 (If you used the same drive for XigmaNAS and for the DATA, don’t forget to select the partition 2) |
| 3-4 | For MBR partition n°3 to 4: To be used only for adding existing disk to XigmaNAS |
| CD/DVD | For CD/DVD ROM (no partition) |
| Previous software RAID | Used to mount Software RAID array created with XigmaNAS releases older than the 0.68 |
| File system | Description |
|---|---|
| UFS | NAS4Free (FreeBSD) native disk |
| FAT | FAT16 or FAT32 drive |
| CD/DVD | Used for CD/DVD ROM with the cd9660 filesystem |
| NTFS | For Windows XP/2000/2003/Vista native hard drive |
| EXT2 | For Linux EXT2 or EXT3 drive |
Mount point name: Name that you want to appear on the network (Raid5, in this example). Supports Linux standards, a-z, A-Z, 0-9, - (dash), _ (underscore) characters.
Description: Enter a description for the share.
Click Save and the disk should appear in the table with a Status of Configuring. If you have additional disks you have previously Added and Formatted, then you can also mount these now.
Click Apply Changes and a 'Changes have been applied successfully' message should be seen. Drive Status should now show OK