External Enclosure Compatibility

[guillaumesoucy]

Hi everyone!

I have setup a FreeNAS machine but I need to know if I can hook a 8 bay external enclosure to the FreeNAS machine. So, the external enclosure support many type of RAID, I need to set it to RAID 0 for the 8 disks appear like on big disk of 32 Tb, but will the FreeNAS will recognize the external enclosure as one volume of 32 TB?

The enclosure is a Mediasonic ProRaid H8R2-SU3S2

Thanks!

Guillaume

 

[cyberjock]

That hardware is not adequate for a FreeNAS box. It may or may not work. Even if it does work, it won't be something I'd recommend you store data on. It uses hardware RAID and uses either USB or esata with a port multiplier. You are just begging to be a victim of data loss with that kind of hardware.

 

[Ericloewe]

Four words:

DO NOT DO IT!

Why, you ask?

1. Such enclosures are typically a piece of crap, especially because SATA port multipliers aren't very well supported and are known to be unreliable.
2. If you were to ignore the above, you'd soon realize that FreeNAS would see that... blob (there's no better word for it) of drives as a single drive (from which it gets no S.M.A.R.T. to add insult to injury). Any single disk fails and every last byte on the other drives is useless. If you were to use this hardware (again, do not use it!), you'd need to set it to JBOD and pray to your favorite deity (or that most likely to grant your wish) that your hardware will work with the SATA port multiplier (it's a rather big if)

If you want an external enclosure, use one eSATA cable per drive (extremely messy) OR use an SAS controller and external enclosure with SAS expander. This thread should provide you with enough information to start figuring out how to implement an SAS solution.