LSI MegaRaid 84016E

[Halfe]

Hi.

I am looking for a new Raid card for my server and are looking at LSI MEGARAID 84016E
I can see that in the HW support for FreeNAS 9.2 it doesent support this HW.

Is there anyone who has run this card on FreeNAS anyway and got it to work? been googli'n all week and cant find any specific.

Halfe

 

[cyberjock]

Well, you should be avoiding RAID cards per the manual. I'd never recommend someone build a FreeNAS server with that controller even if it was expected to be compatible.

Any reason you aren't following the recommendations in the stickies in the forum for picking out a good SAS/SATA controller for FreeNAS? The M1015 is the cheapest 8-port controller you're going to find, its not a RAID controller, and its heavily supported by the community here.

 

[Halfe]

The reason is cause i have 12 Drives in my NAS right now and are running 2xSilicon SATA cards 4 ports. + 4 on MB. i want to get a card with higher number of SATA/SAS ports. My Brother is currently running Highpoint Rocketraid (unknows) and that is working great.

Im looking for a card with atleast 12 or 16 SATA/SAS ports.

 

[cyberjock]

I'd look at buying 2xM1015s then over that RAID controller. RAID controllers can really screw up ZFS because ZFS expects to be the owner of the disks, but the RAID controller usually is the actual owner. So things conflict and you lose. This is a common mistake and many people don't realize they've made this mistake until they lose their pool. Please don't be a statistic for the forums!

Optionally you could get a SAS expander and a single M1015, but that's going to be more expensive than 2xM1015s.

The problems with RAID controllers is that they will often work fine when you build it. It could work fine for days or even weeks. But that one bad day you have will trash your pool and you'll be looking for your backups. Recovery of your data won't be possible unless you want to pay 5 figures to a 3rd party recovery company like Ontrack or similar.

 

[Richman]

I am getting the feeling that it is well known that LSI MegaRaid MR SATA raid cards are not flashable to something like IT mode then?