Hello, I am running FreeNAS-11.2-U5. I had it working fine with a Dell 1950 48 GB Ram on a SATA 12 slot storage array with Vmware. I have since decommissioned Vmware and rebuilt the Storage array with new and different drives. I have FreeNAS-11.2-U5 installed on 2 USB drives. I can see the drives on bootup only if I go into Ctrl R to configure the Raid on the Dell H800 Raid Card. Prior to decommissioning Vmware, I would see all the drives listed on bootup at the BIOS screen. I can create a RAID from the BIOS but unable to see drives from FreeNAS-11.2-U5 GUI. If I switch to the Shell and run camcontrol devlist I see the disks but when i go to storage/disks in the GUI I do not see them. I believe it has something to do with not being visable at the BIOS screen during bootup but i have searched high and far on many forums. I suspect it may be a setting somewhere in the bios but have not found it yet. Any help will be appreciated. Also if i create the RAID from Ctrl R I see the Raid from the GUI.
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Disks not present
- Thread starter twomenspa
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Replace this with a Dell H200e or similar external HBA. RAID cards are not recommended for use with ZFS.
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Just so I'm clear on the sequence of events and hardware here;
Was the PE1950 running VMware or FreeNAS before? Or was it running VMware with FreeNAS as a guest, and then it was converted to being a bare-metal FreeNAS machine?
If I recall correctly the PERC H800 and similar RAID cards won't pass unconfigured drives to the OS for access; this is why you only see them in the GUI if you use the RAID BIOS (Ctrl+R) to set up a virtual disk which is then presented to the OS.
Was the PE1950 running VMware or FreeNAS before? Or was it running VMware with FreeNAS as a guest, and then it was converted to being a bare-metal FreeNAS machine?
If I recall correctly the PERC H800 and similar RAID cards won't pass unconfigured drives to the OS for access; this is why you only see them in the GUI if you use the RAID BIOS (Ctrl+R) to set up a virtual disk which is then presented to the OS.
Dell 1950 was running FreeNAS, built 2 VMWare hosts on 2950's. Setup NAS Raid's from FreeNAS on 1950. Presented LUNS and created datastores from VMWare, Used datastores for VM's within vSphere. I had 4 VM's running under the 2 Dell 2950's ESXi 5.5. When I would boot the 1950, you would see the list of disks connected via the H800 to the mass storage device. I decommissioned all of the VM's, shutdown all the hosts, rebuilt the VM servers on local storage on 3rd 2950 with HyperV 2012. Completely isolated from the original NAS and VMWare. REbuilt NAS on new USB drives from the front panel with the same MSD, with some of the same drive and a few new ones. There are 12 drives, 4 250 GB, 4 1TB, and 2 2TB. In the shell it sees them but doesnt display on BIOS when booting, yet Ctrl R does show the disks or the GUI to create the volumns.
FYI, i also had an FTP server running via FreeNAS but i think that is completely irrelevant of this issue. It was on drives that were replaced.
Thanks
Dave
FYI, i also had an FTP server running via FreeNAS but i think that is completely irrelevant of this issue. It was on drives that were replaced.
Thanks
Dave
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What is the make and model of the enclosure? Have you mixed SAS and SATA drives by any chance?
I would try to eliminate potential hardware issues by using only a limited number of disks.
I would try to eliminate potential hardware issues by using only a limited number of disks.
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In this case, if you want to use the H800 (which you shouldn't, in my opinion!) you would have to recreate the "logical disk" or "logical disks" in the PERC BIOS in order for them to be visible to the OS. It's showing "0 logical drives" because none are configured, and without that, the PERC won't pass the unbound drives for data access to the OS. You'll see the passN devices because the SAS bus is aware of their presence for things like hot add/remove/etc, but there's no actual access allowed.
Simply put, the H800 is not the right hardware for this use case. Get an external SAS HBA like the H200e (and flash to IT mode) or the "6Gbps external SAS HBA" - not sure what the Dell P/N is for that model.
Simply put, the H800 is not the right hardware for this use case. Get an external SAS HBA like the H200e (and flash to IT mode) or the "6Gbps external SAS HBA" - not sure what the Dell P/N is for that model.
Im not against getting a new Mass Storage, what would your recommendation be. This is for a small business, 3-5 servers. Main reason for the storage other than normal business is to save video footage of the property that has numerous renters.
Thanks
Thanks
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Using FreeNAS is fine - it's just the RAID card that needs to be removed and replaced with an HBA.
The key difference is that the H200e is able to act as an HBA ("Host Bus Adapter") and pass the drives through so that the OS (FreeNAS) sees twelve individual disks, at which point FreeNAS can use ZFS to perform the "RAID-like" features (redundancy, striping, etc) - the H800 has no such functionality and is designed to handle those operations on the card itself.
ZFS by design expects that direct, unfettered access to the disks - abstracting them behind a RAID controller has various side effects, most of which are considered bad to various degrees, from "poor performance" to "feature unavailable" to "catastrophic data loss"
Let me ask this, I first installed another NAS software, xig, it allowed the disks to pass thru the OS. I wonder if somehow that configured the H800 card and allowed FreeNAS to see it when i switched to FreeNAS from the other xig by importing a foreign config? Just a thought, ill get the new HBA.
