HDD Failed?

[Glorious1]

No, the controller on your HBA is an SAS2008. The card would be an SAS 9211, for instance.

So should I be searching for the controller or the card? When I search for 9240-8i, it is only found when preceded by 'MegaRAID SAS'. There I find versions from 20.13.1-0240 back to 20.9.1-0006. Nothing like 20.00.07.

 

[28061]

Unless I am missing something, there is no reason to require losing redundancy. You would shut down the power, swap two drives, power up. That alone does not require a rebuild of either disk.

Ah I see. Apologies, I assumed the redundancy was tied to the HBA port, and that by swapping them, I'd screw up the redundancy, forcing it to wipe them and resynch everything. If it won't, I'll do it tomorrow. But I'm on 13hr nights, so my updates may be slow for a few days.


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[Robert Trevellyan]

I assumed the redundancy was tied to the HBA port

One of the great things about ZFS is that drives can be moved between ports without anything bad happening.

 

[28061]

One of the great things about ZFS is that drives can be moved between ports without anything bad happening.

Useful to know. Thank you.


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[28061]

One of the great things about ZFS is that drives can be moved between ports without anything bad happening.

I've just moved one of my disks from one of the 'working' ports into the 'under investigation' port, and will leave it running for the day. See how it goes!

 

[Ericloewe]

So should I be searching for the controller or the card? When I search for 9240-8i, it is only found when preceded by 'MegaRAID SAS'. There I find versions from 20.13.1-0240 back to 20.9.1-0006. Nothing like 20.00.07.

As I said, SAS 9211. The SAS 9240 also uses the SAS2008 controller, but with RAID firmware, so that's all that LSI provides for it.

 

[Ericloewe]

Ah I see. Apologies, I assumed the redundancy was tied to the HBA port, and that by swapping them, I'd screw up the redundancy, forcing it to wipe them and resynch everything. If it won't, I'll do it tomorrow. But I'm on 13hr nights, so my updates may be slow for a few days.


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Literally no vaguely usable RAID solution ties disks to ports. Not Intel fakeRAID, not LSI HW RAID, certainly not ZFS. (the list goes on, naturally)

 

[Glorious1]

As I said, SAS 9211. The SAS 9240 also uses the SAS2008 controller, but with RAID firmware, so that's all that LSI provides for it.

Thank you. I'm getting there. This stuff is confusing. The 9211 has version 20.00.00 for every platform/installation method, but 20.00.07 only for DOS/Windows. Can I use the sas2flash installer for FreeBSD and the 2118it.bin and mptsas2.rom from the 20.00.07 Windows package?

 

[28061]

Literally no vaguely usable RAID solution ties disks to ports. Not Intel fakeRAID, not LSI HW RAID, certainly not ZFS. (the list goes on, naturally)

As you'll have guessed, my RAID experience is pretty poor. I was driven to FreeNas by repeated mobo integrated HBA failures that I wasn't able to recover from. They were basically RAID controllers that sat on gaming motherboards - nothing industrial or useful about them really.

So today, I swopped two HDD's round in the trays at the front of my machine, and in doing so returned the repeatedly failing drive into the array. In doing so, I remembered there's something else to consider - my machine has the hot swappable drive trays at the front, which sits in front of one of those SATA plates, which acts as a middle man between the HDD and the sata cable. There's twelve trays at the front, so if I get the same errors, I'll also need to try a different tray.

However, I reinstated the drive this morning and took 8 hours to resilver. It's currently scrubbing and I've got a green light with no reported errors.
Somewhere along the line, one of the three mirrored USB boot devices died too. It's happened before, so I keep a couple of identical flash drives around just in case. This is now replaced and is currently being resilvered too.

 

[Ericloewe]

Thank you. I'm getting there. This stuff is confusing. The 9211 has version 20.00.00 for every platform/installation method, but 20.00.07 only for DOS/Windows. Can I use the sas2flash installer for FreeBSD and the 2118it.bin and mptsas2.rom from the 20.00.07 Windows package?

You'll find that all platforms other than DOS/Windows don't actually include the firmware, so that's what you always have to do - with one catch: FreeNAS already includes sas2flash, but it's safer to use the UEFI version, as there definitely won't be any activity on the HBA during the flash then.

 

[Glorious1]

You'll find that all platforms other than DOS/Windows don't actually include the firmware, so that's what you always have to do - with one catch: FreeNAS already includes sas2flash, but it's safer to use the UEFI version, as there definitely won't be any activity on the HBA during the flash then.

Thanks, I managed to do it with your info combined with my old notes. Flashing that thing always seems like a scary obstacle course in the dark.

 

[28061]

So, we're a couple of days down the line, and I've still got a green light with no reporting errors.

The only permanent change I made during the troubleshooting process was to upgrade the HBA firmware. I did also swap two of the HDD trays around at the front, but I'm still using the same disks, in the same trays, with the same cables, just in a different order.

Throughout, all of the diagnosts from a variety of tools came back clear. What did people think of the speed tests I published?
Am I really putting it down to firmware bugs?

 

[Ericloewe]

Am I really putting it down to firmware bugs?

I don't remember the exact changelog, but versions prior to 20.00.04 were pretty buggy and several people had trouble with them.

 

[28061]

I don't remember the exact changelog, but versions prior to 20.00.04 were pretty buggy and several people had trouble with them.

Ok, well I'm quite happy to write it off to that, unless anything further comes to light. It was an interesting experience being able to see, rely upon, and use the redundancy. Never had to do it before, not successfully anyway, and FreeNas exceeded my expectations.

Thank you very much for your support [emoji122][emoji119]


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[garym]

Could I ask how you find the firmware? sas2flash says my HBA is SAS2008. When I go to this page
https://www.broadcom.com/support/download-search/
and search for that, there is no firmware for it. When I search for Megaraid 9240-8i, which I wrote down from the box, there are a number of firmwares, but even in the archive tab, I can't find a version number that low.

I know this is resolved, but, FYI, go to the motherboad manufacturer first, in this case supermicro, for firmware updates.

 

[Ericloewe]

I know this is resolved, but, FYI, go to the motherboad manufacturer first, in this case supermicro, for firmware updates.

It's been established that the firmware is the exact same.

 

[garym]

It's been established that the firmware is the exact same.

That wasn't the point. He had many questions about what he had and where to find the firmware. When one has a Supermicro product and they goto supermicro, find the firmware available for that product, they can be sure they have the correct firmware quickly without any doubt.
Yes I know that the firmware is the same as you have said.