My Freenas config: LSI 9280-24i4e SAS Controller?

[Schaeffer]

Hi, I'm running for nearly a year this FreeNAS config:
Case: Norco RPC-4224 (24 hotswap bays)
MB: Tyan Tempest i5000VS
CPUs: 2x Intel Xeon
RAM: 8GB ECC DDR
Controller: LSI 9280-24i4e SAS 6Gb
Drives: 8x Samsung Spinpoint 2TB in a RaidZ2 array
System: FreeNAS 8.2 Beta2

When I fist setup the system with FreeNAS 8.0, the drives where unrecognized in the FreeNAS system, so I created 8x 2TB Raid 0 virtual drives in the controller BIOS. Then booted with FreeNAS and created the array with the virtual drives. Now I reinstalled FreeNAS with the latest Beta, and drives don't show up in the GUI (only da0 -the USB flashdrive- appears), so I can't create SMART testing task.

Do I have correctly configured the controller?

Also is it recommanded to run a 16 or 24 drive RaidZ2 array, or is it too dangerous for data integrity?

 

[survive]

Hi Schaeffer,

I'm not sure what's happening with your smart tests, but here's what I think....

Since you have the LSI card between FreeNAS & your drives the smart process can't access the drives directly to talk to them and check their status. I think you want to use the "MegaCli" program included with FreeNAS to do this. I think this doc might help you out (it's the first thing I found):

http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Storage Products/Internal RAID/embedded_mr_sw_ug.pdf

You don't want to make a single 24 disk raidz\raidz2 pool...that many disks in a pool will case you problems. Fortunately ZFS has a way around that. When you created your 8 disk raidz2 pool you actually made something called a "virtual device" out of the 8 disks and put ZFS on top of it. The vdev (virtual device) is kind of the basic building block of ZFS and is key to how you are able to create a pool of 10's, 100's or even 1000's of disks. You can make a vdev out of any sort of disk, be it a single drive, an SSD, a mirror or a raidz\z2 pool. You can add vdevs to an existing pool or combine them when you make a pool and this is what allows you to make monster storage. The thing to remember is you always want your vdevs to have redundancy and ideally you want them to have the same performance characteristics.

In your case you could make 4 6-disk raidz vdevs, 3 8-disk raidz2 vdevs or a dozen 2-disk mirrors (among other combos) out of your 24 drives depending on your performance & resilience needs.

-Will