Gigabyte Z77-HD3 hardware RAID10

[RoSi]

Hi,

I've created hardware RAID10 (in RAID controller BIOS of motherboard with 4x 1TB drives) but FreeNAS is still seeing my hard drives as one by one and not as created RAID. Is FreeNAS supporting hardware RAID on this motherboard please?

 

[jgreco]

What hardware RAID do you think there is on that motherboard?

There's no hardware RAID on that motherboard. It's what we like to call fakeRAID. It requires a special device driver and does it all in software on the host CPU, with just enough bits in the BIOS to get it to load Windows in the first place.

 

[RoSi]

Thank you for the reply.

What You will recomend as alternative to RAID10 with 4x 1TB drives please? I am having 4GB RAM in that system. And really do not wish to buy a RAID controller.

 

[dlavigne]

ZFS does not require a RAID controller to provide RAIDZ. It would be nice to have more RAM though, does the motherboard support more RAM?

 

[jgreco]

We usually discourage the 4GB guys from ZFS. Stability is questionable under 8GB. I mean, yeah, it mostly seems to work, but my philosophy is that for an appliance intended to reliably store data, "it mostly works" is basically "don't do it." And yes tuning helps, but generally it seems like bad advice to try ZFS on 4GB unless you know what you are doing.

But I was having fun abusing my 30TB pool on 6GB RAM :)

 

[RoSi]

So, with that configuration, what will be best to do be as close as possible to RAID10 please?
Definately drop ZFS and use UFS instead because of RAM.

 

[dlavigne]

It depends upon your performance requirements. ZFS will work in 4GB, but performance will suffer. ZFS will offer data integrity in addition to redundancy, plus the flexibility of datasets. UFS will only offer redundancy.

 

[jgreco]

Eugh. Kind of bad news. I thought that RAID10 UFS had been enabled in the GUI under FreeNAS 9 but I don't see it.

So let's experiment. Go to a shell. I have four disks, da3...da6

gpart create -s GPT da3
gpart create -s GPT da4
gpart create -s GPT da5
gpart create -s GPT da6

gmirror label -v -b round-robin mirror1 da3 da4
gmirror label -v -b round-robin mirror2 da5 da6

gstripe label -v stripe /dev/mirror/mirror1 /dev/mirror/mirror2

newfs /dev/stripe/stripe

Go back to GUI, "Auto Import Volume", and import "stripe" (not the mirrorX's!)

This is in no way a promise or guarantee that this will work for you, will continue to work for you, etc. but it seems to work, so feel free to play with it.