3Ware Failed Drive Alerting

[gooch]

I was wondering the best way to be alerted when a drive fails under FreeNAS 8. I'm using a 3Ware 9500 controller with 4 SATA drives RAIDed at the 3ware level. Should I change this to JBOD and use ZFS to software RAID instead? Will that give FreeNAS direct access to the disks and their health? Thanks in advance.

 

[jgreco]

Yes, you're not supposed to use hardware RAID, it is somewhat self-defeating. ZFS is capable of figuring out when your disks are seriously broken, and I'm pretty sure that SMART can be configured to work through the controller as well (haven't tried though).

By the way, maybe you could take a peek at dave@58ghz's message about a 3Ware 9500 in this same forum. If you have it working, it might be educational to compare firmware revisions, because his isn't working.

 

[gooch]

It appears that this RAID controller does not allow for JBOD which would expose the physical disks to the S.M.A.R.T. service. The closest thing I can do is create 4 x single disk RAID 0 arrays, but then it still presents LUNs that S.M.A.R.T. can't read. Additionally, I'm then using a software rather than a hardware RAID.

I've opted to go with the hardware RAID from the controller. On the plus side I received my first daily report today, and it must invoke tw_cli for some of the output because it includes physical disk health - which is what I was looking for.

I'll check with dave@58ghz's to see if I can help him.