Not all drives showing

[Room7]

I got FreeNas setup. I have 2 SATA drives and 6 IDE drives (Ya, I know what you are thinking). I just want a file server, no RAID for now. I have a P4 and 4gb of ram.

I have a Promise Ultra66 IDE Controlle Card connecting the IDE drives, the SATA drives are connected directly to the motherboard.

Only 2 of the IDE drives are being recognized by FreeNAS, non of the SATA drives are recognized.

What could be the problem? Any suggestions for a new pci IDE card? Do the SATA drives need to be connected through a pci card?

 

[cyberjock]

IDE is quite old(it was superceeded in 2005!) and as such, I would expect support for IDE controllers to be very scarce.

Generally, when disks aren't detected its because the controller they are connected to isn't compatible with FreeNAS/FreeBSD.

Also, IDE drives from that era are quite small. The power used by 8 drives that are smaller can often be replaced with just 1 newer drive. Quite often, even 1 year's worth of electricity makes buying a new larger drive more cost effective than powering old small disks.

Read through the stickies on the forum for recommended hardware for SATA, ECC RAM recommendations, etc. You aren't going to find much in terms of IDE recommendations because IDE is long obsolete and effectively dead.

 

[Room7]

IDE is quite old(it was superceeded in 2005!) and as such, I would expect support for IDE controllers to be very scarce.

Generally, when disks aren't detected its because the controller they are connected to isn't compatible with FreeNAS/FreeBSD.

Also, IDE drives from that era are quite small. The power used by 8 drives that are smaller can often be replaced with just 1 newer drive. Quite often, even 1 year's worth of electricity makes buying a new larger drive more cost effective than powering old small disks.

Read through the stickies on the forum for recommended hardware for SATA, ECC RAM recommendations, etc. You aren't going to find much in terms of IDE recommendations because IDE is long obsolete and effectively dead.

I totally understand about the IDEs, I am just doing this cus I have spare parts sitting around. The IDES total 4tbs, im willing to put in ~$30-50 to get a card that would support it, 4tb of new drives would be around $150-200

 

[cyberjock]

And if you do some math, you'll figure out that in 1 year you will probably save enough electricity with the 4TB to offset the cost of your IDE controller and the extra electricity from the extra drives. Not to mention the higher chance of failure for disks of your age, the trouble you are going to go through trying to get those IDE disks to work, and the high chance you will have disappointing performance of hard drives from that era.

Just saying, stop trying to reuse old hardware and think about what you are doing. You'll realize this isn't likely to work out for you. Quite a few people have tried to reuse old hardware. It's great to experiment with FreeNAS, but the second you decide you want to run one 24x7 and store your data on it, its a big fat mistake.

 

[gpsguy]

Another problem with old hardware is that it usually doesn't have enough RAM for FreeNAS. And, depending on the age of the system, buying additional DDR1/DDR2 memory can be cost prohitibitive.