How-to guide for newbies?

[jemannin]

Hi!

It was kind that the adminstators helped me to get to this forum. I appreciate your hard work on this custom firmware. I want to in advance say sorry if the questions sound obvious. I have some experience with personal networking but not that much about more complicated stuff.

BACKGROUND:

My plan with the Lacie 5big network 2 is to make it shared cloud storage because it is pretty expensive to get that much cloud storage needed for large video and other files. I found that there is an addon to Owncloud for fvdw-sl so maybe using that. And maybe for some other project too.

I have had problems with the Lacie stock firmware. First of all, Lacie seems to somehow get hard drives out of the structure and identify them as broken. A few times recreating the raid to the hard drive has worked but about 8 years ago we lost all of our data on that server, except the ones that were backed up. We have gotten, if I remember right, a couple of first broken 3TB harddrives under warranty. But since then the hard drives that Lacie has said that are broken are still working somehow ok. (And of course, we take nowadays a good care of the data that it is backed up at least in 2 places and most valuable in Google drive.) Secondly, the speed of the Lacie seems to be slower than it should. The last 5 years keeping it as an archive has worked OK, so I wanted to try if the custom firmware would help to make the Nas back to real use. And maybe, I hope, making it more reliable and maybe faster.

THE QUESTIONS ABOUT FVDW-SL:

So I was searching in the forum but could not really find what should I do to install fvdw-sl firmware to my Lacie 5big network 2 with stock firmware.
Would anyone be kind to tell me where I can find an up-to-date guide what should I do from beginning to end to install the custom firmware?
And what firmware version should I use?

So if I understood right should I install all the patches in build version order from here:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3532
or install some 11.0 version and then upgrade to newer like here:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3059

I also read there topics but not sure what is the most up to date information:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2952
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3149
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=457

And I also read about the addons:
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=645



Thank you for your help and greetings from Finland! :-D
Jeremias Manninen

[fvdw]

Hi, in principle you can find all you need to install the firmware here https://plugout.net/viewforum.php?f=7
If it is a first time install then using fvdw-sl console 6.0 with fvdw-sl 18-1 under ms-windows is the easiest way. It will install version 18-1.
In the same forum you can find a guide how to use the fvdw-sl console to install firmware and patches. If you have 18-1 installed you can use the fvdw-sl webinterface to upgrade to 18-2.

For installation use only one disk in most lefthand slot seen from the back. When firmware is installed and 5big2 boots fvdw-sl firmware you can add extra disks (of course shutdown the 5big2 to add disks is the recommended way hot swap may work but can also cause erratic behavior) Be sure these disks do not contain lacie firmware. Better it is to use empty disk which has no partition table (delete partition table using another pc before putting them in the 5big2