Dell R420 with Perc H310 non-raid issues

[benitowarez]

I have been working on buiding this server for several weeks now, and I am in need of assistance from more knowledgeable people than myself.

Background: I am using a Dell R420 with the Perc H310 configured in non-raid. I have 1 SAS drive in bay 0 with Truenas installed and 2 TB Red WD SSD's in bays 1-4. This is intended to give a total pool size of 5TB+ in a Raid-z. The issues I am having is getting the pool to configure without errors. When I set up the pool I get a slew of hard error cmd=read fsb XXXXXX for each drive multiple times. Then Truenas stops responding from the web ui. I am in desperate need of help/guidance on how to proceed. Are these drives all bad? Did I set this up poorly? The last thing I want to do is set these up in a hardware raid instead of having Truenas manage it properly.

The original pool was comprised of 4 600 GB SAS drives without issue. The original bays are being used with the SSDs, and I believe the server hardware is not faulty given that information. A screenshot of the errors are below for reference.

 

[sfcredfox]

Did you have a combination of SAS and SATA running successfully in that server running under TrueNAS before?

Backplanes occasionally have issues mixing SAS and SATA. I think some of the older HP backplanes I've used couldn't do both at the same time.

 

[jgreco]

You need to crossflash your H310 to work in IT mode. As it stands, you have a RAID controller, and this is unacceptable for use with TrueNAS.

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

As a Dell and HP server guy myself, what @jgreco is saying goes against the long-time systems knowledge we've accumulated, however he's right; ZFS is the RAID controller, things have to be done differently (it's also less expensive which is another adjustment we have to make).

 

[benitowarez]

Thank you all for your comments!

If I understand the consensus, I should flash into IT mode and use the drives as passthrough. This should allow the use of mixed mode SAS/SATA or should I still use all SATA to match the 2 TB drives?

I just installed Truenas from usb, I know it is not recommended, as a test and the drives failed again, but I have not flashed back into IT mode firmware.

 

[jgreco]

I should flash into IT mode and use the drives as passthrough.

There is no "passthrough" mode for an HBA; the term "IT" means "Initiator-Target" which means that the HBA can act as either an SAS initiator or SAS target. For a NAS, your HBA functions as an SAS initiator for SCSI transactions. The HBA merely proxies transactions back and forth from the host CPU/driver to the SAS devices, allowing the host to pretend that it is talking directly to the drives (but actually doing it indirectly via the HBA RoC).

This is different than a "passthrough" mode where the SAS initiation endpoint is the RAID controller itself, and then the RAID controller arranges for the host driver to see these as a RAID5 virtual device, or may create some other sort of pseudo device and present that to the host driver, or any of the other lovely more intelligent and clever things a RAID controller might do.

This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but it has significant impact on the design of the host driver, and where error recovery is done and how that's handled. This turns out to be very important for ZFS, which does not expect for there to be a layer in between ZFS and the physical hard drives that is meddling with the transactions that ZFS is trying to cause the drives to do.

This should allow the use of mixed mode SAS/SATA

Mixed mode SAS/SATA is expected to be just fine. There are some weird cases on certain SAS expanders where this might not be true in every case, but you'd likely know pretty quickly if that was the case. Probably just a firmware update to take care of it.

it's also less expensive which is another adjustment we have to make

I can fix that for you. Send any dollars saved due to cost underruns to

sol.net Network Services
Attn: Caffeine Fund
P.O. Box 16
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[benitowarez]

Thank you jgreco for breaking that down. I have flashed into IT Mode firmware, but I am having errors on the SSDs when trying to build the pool. I suspect I have bad drives. Below is a screenshot I was able to grab from the iDRAC console before the server became unresponsive.

The Truenas web ui showed 95% complete and was stuck at the dataset building status.

 

[jgreco]

I'd try running the drives through any tools that the manufacturer has available. That doesn't look healthy.