RAID setup

[marcos86]

Good morning,
I'm new to the forum and to FreeNAS also.
I acquired an old Dell PowerEdge 2950III server which feature 6 1TB drives and 8GB of RAM.

From what I have understanded in the wiki page is suggested with ZFS to disable hardware RAID and leave FreeNAS handle the drives via software.

My problem is that I have a Perc controller and I cannot disable the RAID from BIOS, what I read in this post is a suggestion to set the controller to RAID0, but I think is the worst scenario for a backup appliance like my case.

Should I use or not RAID hardware? And if yes with what RAID mode should I install FreeNAS?

Thanks
Marcos

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Should I use or not RAID hardware?

Not.

Install an HBA that does things the way ZFS prefers.

But to be honest, that server doesn't look like a very good platform for FreeNAS.

 

[marcos86]

Hi Robert,
thank you for your answer.
As this was a gift I have a problem with purchasing additional hardware since I have not much money.

Do you think I can run FreeNAS also with RAID hardware enabled or that will be impossible to do?

Also

But to be honest, that server doesn't look like a very good platform for FreeNAS.

why you say doesn't look like a very good platform?
Thanks

 

[SweetAndLow]

Hi Robert,
thank you for your answer.
As this was a gift I have a problem with purchasing additional hardware since I have not much money.

Do you think I can run FreeNAS also with RAID hardware enabled or that will be impossible to do?

Also


why you say doesn't look like a very good platform?
Thanks

No you shouldn't run zfs with that raid card. you should spend $100 USD and get a LSI HBA card. Read the Suggested Hardware sticky.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Do you think I can run FreeNAS also with RAID hardware enabled or that will be impossible to do?

Not impossible, just a really bad idea. You already know why, since you said "From what I have understanded in the wiki page is suggested with ZFS to disable hardware RAID and leave FreeNAS handle the drives via software."

why you say doesn't look like a very good platform?

You've already started to discover why, since you need to spend money on it just to get rid of the RAID card. Next, suppose you want to upgrade the RAM from the existing 8GB, which is the minimum for FreeNAS. The 2950III uses FBDIMMs, so 8GB of RAM costs around $300. For $300 you can buy a brand-new PowerEdge T20 or Lenovo TS140.

And it uses FSB technology, which is often mentioned in these forums in the same sentence as "performance killer for ZFS" (you may not care about this, depending on how you plan to use it). It also looks like it will be power hungry and noisy.

You can see from my signature that I'm not averse to using somewhat outdated hardware. If you can get away with only spending $100 on a RAID card and making no other changes, your 2950III may meet your needs for now (you haven't said how you plan to use it), but upgrading it will prohibitively expensive.

 

[marcos86]

Thank you for you answer, searching on DELL wesite I found a SAS6 adapter suggested on this post.
Now thanks to your answers I understanded that is impossible to install on RAID hardware since ZFS want a deep control on hard drives, my question is if the card is the correct one because on specifications I still see RAID marked as Yes.

Thanks
Marcos

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Sorry, I'm not familiar with that card.

How many SATA ports are there on the motherboard? I would start by finding out whether the motherboard's built-in HBA can be set to JBOD mode? That's how I'm using my T110.

If you search these forums for H200 you will find another possible solution (it can be flashed to IT mode).

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

While you're at it, also search the forums for PowerEdge 2950 so you can see what others have said about it recently.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

By the way, I have a SAS 6i controller JW065 with 4-drive breakout cable that came out of my T110 and is yours for the cost of shipping, if you want it (but it looks like you're in Germany, so shipping might be expensive).

 

[HoneyBadger]

The 2950III uses FBDIMMs, so 8GB of RAM costs around $300.

Say what? I can buy 16GB (4x4GB) of refurb PC2-5300F for $40 pretty easily (eBay.) It's power hungry, hot, and noisy, but "expensive" it ain't.

The Dell SAS 6i/R I believe can be flashed similar to the H200, in that you have to do a couple intermediary flashes but since it's an LSI 1068E at heart it should work. Can't speak for 100% certainty though. The H200 though, yes, it can be flashed completely into an LSI 9211-8i. Just record your SAS address first since not all H200s have it on the card as a sticker.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I can buy 16GB (4x4GB) of refurb PC2-5300F for $40 pretty easily (eBay.)

I was quoting new from crucial.com.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I was quoting new from crucial.com.

Fair enough, DDR2 is way old tech now, so new gear is hard to find. My logic would be that any server still using it is used, so I'm fine with used RAM in it.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

My logic would be that any server still using it is used, so I'm fine with used RAM in it.

Absolutely, you can tell from my signature that I have nothing against used gear, and in hindsight quoting new prices on RAM for an old gifted server probably doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Thank you for you answer, searching on DELL wesite I found a SAS6 adapter suggested on this post.

I realized the chipset in the card you found on eBay (LSISAS1068E) is the same as my SAS/6i, so as noted, it can be flashed to IT mode. Keep in mind that it won't benefit from hard drives larger than 2TB. As far as your motherboard goes, it looks like it only has 2 SATA ports, so you definitely need some kind of HBA to make use of all 6 of your hard drives.

 

[marbus90]

Really don't bother with 1068E based cards. Use LSI 2008 ones at least. But then you'll find that you don't have SFF-8087 plugs but these really old 2-lane cables, which aren't easy to come by.

And I hope you don't have to pay the energy bill, otherwise a new server pays off after ~2 years just from energy costs. yes, it's that bad.

 

[marcos86]

Thank you really much for all your answers, it help me a lot, and thanks Robert for your kind offer, unfortunately as I'm in Europe it will cost much the shipping than buy it on ebay locally, but I would like to thank you for your kind gesture.
Ok so what I found is Dell PowerEdge SAS 6/iR RAID Controller Adapter Card CR679

In the specifications on ebay say the same as the website I posted (RAID 0, 1 or non-RAID support only) which "correct me if I'm wrong" mean that after install the card I can configure in bios the JBOD mode (non-RAID).

After that I will install FreeNAS in RAIDZ2 and share my experience.

Regarding backup, I'm curious to know if it will be secure enough on one server appliance only or better to buy another server to have two backup arrays, I just want to share my old scenario where I had a R200 server with two drives one WD and one Seagate configured to be non-RAID with CentOS 6, what I experienced recently after 3 years is a HDD fault (Seagate), of course I aknowledge that the Seagate installed was a consumer desktop hard drive, and I had no other backups rather than the HDD, plus the backup drive was on LVM while system drive on ext4 but that was sufficient to force me rethink my backup plan and searching I found FreeNAS, but the afraid to loose data again is always in my mind.

Thanks
Marcos

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Ok so what I found is Dell PowerEdge SAS 6/iR RAID Controller Adapter Card CR679

In the specifications on ebay say the same as the website I posted (RAID 0, 1 or non-RAID support only) which "correct me if I'm wrong" mean that after install the card I can configure in bios the JBOD mode (non-RAID).

I think you're wrong. That's exactly the card I have, except mine has a bracket, and I now realize that for practical purposes it's identical to the one you found on eBay before, because the underlying controller is an LSISAS1068E. If you want to go with that card, you should be able to get it used on eBay for a lot less than $79 (I'm sure I could ship mine to you for less than that). Also, make sure you have the correct cable to connect the card to your backplane and the correct PCIe riser to install it in.

You will need to flash the card to IT mode to use it with FreeNAS, which I discovered last night is really easy using the package you can download from lsi.com (see attached image). After downloading the package, you need to make a bootable DOS disk and copy the right files to it. Then you restart from the DOS disk and run hbaFlash.bat and it literally walks you through the whole process.

Having said all that, this card has the limitations we discussed earlier, e.g. individual disk capacity limited to 2TB. But it works (I have mine installed in my T110 right now).

As far as backup is concerned, the key point is that RAIDZx is not backup. If the valuable data on your FreeNAS is a backup of data stored elsewhere, as mine is, then backing it up again may not make sense. However, if the data on your FreeNAS is the only copy, then you need to devise a backup strategy for it.

EDIT: when hbaFlash asks what type of card you have, choose 3081.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Good advice but get the LSI "P16" firmware bundle or you risk a mismatch between the firmware and FreeNAS mpt driver, which expects v16 firmware on card.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Good advice but get the LSI "P16" firmware bundle or you risk a mismatch between the firmware and FreeNAS mpt driver, which expects v16 firmware on card.

I thought about that, but I figured it wasn't applicable to this card. I have no warning in FreeNAS.

In dmesg I see:

Code:

mpt0: <LSILogic SAS/SATA Adapter> port 0xfc00-0xfcff mem 0xdfaec000-0xdfaeffff,0xdfaf0000-0xdfafffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci2
mpt0: MPI Version=1.5.20.0

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I was over in this thread and I saw words to the effect that, if FreeNAS is loading the mpt0 driver, the sky is falling.

Just for fun I ran mptutil show adapter:

Code:

mpt0 Adapter:
      Board Name: SAS6IR
  Board Assembly: 
        Chip Name: C1068E
    Chip Revision: UNUSED
      RAID Levels: none

Which tells me nothing I didn't already know