Anyone used HP Proliant Gen8 G1610T yet?

[downlock]

I'm buying new hardware and trying to decide what to use.

My main concern is whether it is easy to configure the B120i/ZM RAID controller for FreeNAS/ZFS (JBOD). Anyone have direct experience with this?



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859108028

 

[Coxswain]

I recently purchased a Microserver G2020T, and from what I can tell the integrated raid controller does not support JBOD or passthrough of disks. Instead what it seems like you can do is:

a) created 4 raid 0 logical drives, each spanning one of your physical drives, and present these to FreeNAS.
b) use AHCI and (for now) deal with the increased fan noise due to this bug in the MicroServer firmware.

From what I understand ( haven't had a chance to test yet) it should also be possible to manage one disk as a raid 0 and manage the other 3 through the AHCI sata controller.

 

[cyberjock]

I'd highly recommend against doing raid-0 of 1 disk. Not that it won't work, it might. But you often lose SMART monitoring and proper error reporting to the OS. So when a disk starts going bad you might not get any warning until its VERY bad.

 

[Coxswain]

Yeah, I'm not inclined to go that route personally but it is an option if, for example, you're using it for a home setup or testing and are not as worried about potentially losing data.

It sounds like the best bet with the Microserver is to buy a second HBA and put it in the PCI expansion port, or just deal with the problems AHCI mode causes with the fan. Hopefully they'll get the fan tables fixed soon, in any case.