R730dx doesn't recognize 1TB drives?

[dashoe]

Some background
We've been running a Dell R730xd with TrueNAS-SCALE-22.12.0 for about a year now. It functions but performs poorly. After scouring this forum, I'm fairly certain the the poor performance is due to the PERC H730p Mini raid controller (it's in HBA mode) which is running 24 drives (2.5" 10K rpm 600GB). I've pulled the unit out of operation to address the storage controller (I'll seek advice for that in another post) and to install larger capacity drives. There are no pools execpt for the boot pool.

TrueNAS was only showing 23 of the 24 drives (I'm not using the two rear drive bays). In order to determine which drive was not being recognized, I pulled out all but the two boot drives and then re-inserted them one by one while watching the output of dmesg -W

Code:

dmesg -W
...
[  241.298121] scsi 0:0:13:0: Direct-Access     HP       EG0600FBLSH      HPD8 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[  241.300577] sd 0:0:13:0: Attached scsi generic sg14 type 0
[  241.301939] sd 0:0:13:0: [sdn] 1172123568 512-byte logical blocks: (600 GB/559 GiB)
[  241.302332] sd 0:0:13:0: [sdn] Write Protect is off
[  241.302384] sd 0:0:13:0: [sdn] Mode Sense: e7 00 10 08
[  241.302871] sd 0:0:13:0: [sdn] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, supports DPO and FUA
[  241.370814] sd 0:0:13:0: [sdn] Attached SCSI disk
...
[  261.353341] megaraid_sas 0000:02:00.0: 126457 (754776072s/0x0002/FATAL) - Unable to access device PD 17(e0x20/s23)

The last line above identified the faulty drive.

Now for my question - When I inserted a 1TB drive, I got no output from dmesg. I tried several known good 1TB drives in several drive bays and no response at all. I'm counting on being able to use 1TB and even larger drives in this system, I'm looking for any idea why these drives aren't being recognized?

Thanks

600 GB Drives - 10K SAS HP Model EG0600FBLSH
1TB Drives - Dell Constellation.2 7.2K SAS Model ST9000640SS

Dell R730xd
2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz
256 GB ECC

 

[Arwen]

If I remember correctly, LSI "megaraid_sas" can not be set to HBA mode. Just using JBOD mode or RAID-0 of a single disk is NOT HBA mode;

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

 

[dashoe]

Thanks for responding,

Apparently, the problem was that the 1TB drives I was using came from a hardware raid virtual disk. After I used the hardware raid config (on the server they came from) to remove the drives from the virtual disk set I was able to use them as expected in Truenas. I guess I should have know but I assumed that Truenas would have seen the drives and allowed me to wipe them but they didn't show up at all. They did show up in the controllers config screen but with a "Foreign" signiture, so lesson learned.

BTW, the controller is a PERC H730 which does have an HBA "mode" and the disks all show up in Truenas. Never the less I'm going to replace it with the HBA330 to get better performance.

 

[Nixoid]

Have few r730 and r730XD. HBA330 best choice for TrueNas, IMHO.
R730xd can recognize and use all my SAS/SATA HDD up to 2tb (max sff HDD I have). Regular 730 LFF (not XD) eat up to 18tb.
Tested on 730xd 24SFF:
Up to 2tb sff HDD.
Up to 7tb SAS SSD.
Up to 6.8tb NVMe U.2 drive.
And only small m.2 drives I checked in PCIe to m.2 adapters - 2tb max.

 

[dashoe]

It was operator error. The drive came out of a hardware raid set and hadn't been cleared (I guess I thought TrueNas could wipe it). Once I cleared it in the controller it worked fine.

Thanks though.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Ya, as you found out, you need to use the controller UI when the server boots to import the foreign drives and clear em. (dont need to put them back in the old server)