Migrating to FreeNAS - Check my plan for me please?

[rogerh]

Hi Roger - Yes, that was the reason they recommended using disks as RAID 0 - to gain full access to the drive for ZFS. If you're interested, the blog is https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html -- They were using an LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i

Yes, people have done that but many of the experts here (of which I am not one) will advise someone in that position to get a new controller instead. You often can't get access to SMART data on the drives, and perhaps other mysterious things happen if you use RAID 0 underneath ZFS. But if it isn't an option with your board that's no problem!

 

[averyfreeman]

So, along those lines, if I wanted to get a controller card down the line, should I opt for something like this? http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.cfm

It's a 8x SAS controller based on the Marvell 9480 chipset with no hardware RAID support (JBOD only)

 

[rogerh]

I'll leave an opinion on that to the experts! (They do seem to favour various LSI controllers that can be flashed to JBOD functions.)

 

[Ericloewe]

So, along those lines, if I wanted to get a controller card down the line, should I opt for something like this? http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SAS2LP-MV8.cfm

It's a 8x SAS controller based on the Marvell 9480 chipset with no hardware RAID support (JBOD only)

Not really.

You'd be looking at an LSI SAS 2008/2308 or 3008 controller, meaning the following cards, for instance:
LSI SAS 9211, 9207 or 9240
IBM M1015 or M1115
... and plenty of others.

 

[averyfreeman]

Oh, yeah, I should have done a little reading before I posted that --- I poked around and saw that FreeBSD is not supported by the Marvell 9480 :/

Thanks for the recommended drive cards / controllers, Eric. I'll bet there's a sticky somewhere with some info about that, isn't there ...?? (Hmm....)

 

[cyberjock]

Yep.. see the recommended hardware sticky in the hardware section.