general installation and tuning for performance

[vivek]

Hi,
After thinking for a long time, I finally used an ASUS P5B- Deluxe board, 6GB DDR2-800 RAM, 6 disks (SATA-II, 1TB each) and a 4GB USB stick tried to install FreeNAS 8.3 but no dice. Installation would be fine, but on booting it would say "Cannot find system disk" this despite making the USB as a HDD in BIOS (as people suggested) and booting from it. The CD-ROM was an external drive from where I installed FreeNAS and I would disconnect after installation completes and it goes to reboot. Gave up and used a PATA hard disk that I had laying around and installed to it and viola everything works in that I can boot FreeNAS off the PATA disk. Couple of question:

The motherboard has two NICs in it, is there something I should do specific to this board to ensure it works fine?
Any tuning that I should do before I start the system.
I will make it raidz1 so will have 5TB capacity, any expert see something wrong there?

Thank you in advance for your suggestions/gentle criticisms...

 

[joeschmuck]

The P5B is an excellent board, having owned one myself (and still do for my wives computer).

I suspect you might be running into a problem which which USB port is bootable or not. Did you try to put the USB flash drive into different ports and boot it up? I think you have done this but only with the USB Flash drive installed (remove the PATA drive connection) power on the machine and enter the BIOS. Ensure the USB Flash is selected as the first boot device.

All I'd suggest is to ensure you have the latest BIOS for the board and you should be fine with it.

 

[vivek]

Thanks for the feedback, joe tried all the four USB ports, lots of headbanging. Frankly now that is working without the USB quite happy with it. Lots of fan, so setup shoud stay cool inside, wanted to save as much power as possible. Should have mentioned that the CPU is a Celeron 430, i.e. single-core with 512K cache @ 35W so CPU performance "might" be a limiter but no clue on that right now. Did not try the latest BIOS will try that later today.

Thanks

 

[joeschmuck]

That board is not new so it may have the current BIOS but unless you check you will never know. Another option is to just leave it on the PATA hard drive. FreeNAS can be installed on whatever you want, and it sure does boot faster from a hard drive.

 

[vivek]

Yet another question, if someone else can please answer it. seems like that the HBA's based on LSI 2008 chip are well supported, but no idea on support for LSI 2308. Any well supported LSI 2308 based HBA's that someone is aware of and willing to share would be great.

Of the LSI 2008 chipset, it seems that the Intel or IBM labeled cards maybe the best, any caveats (besides flashing with the IT mode firmware) that one needs to be aware of? I have read up on various forums etc., but if someone has first hand knowledge and I can leverage it I would like to do that.

Also, a pointer to installing the various plugins? I did read about it in the manual but do still have some questions off it.


Thanks...