Stupid Long Reboot Times!

[Chris Moore]

When I remove a disk, if I turn on the monitor, I see errors scrolling across the screen so fast that it looks like white noise, and usually that is when the GUI hangs up and requires a reboot. Now that you have mentioned it, maybe I should buy another and swap them out, just to see, since they are only about $9 now, with free shipping! Unless you have a better suggestion for a SFF-8088 external SAS card?

I am having a hard time with understanding your hardware configuration. Can you give a rundown on what you are using? Why do you need an external cable connection?
Yes, there are MANY better cards you could be using. That one is going to limit the size of each disk to 2TB and it is going to limit the total system bandwidth to the attached disks. It is very outdated. I could make some suggestions, but I need to understand your configuration a little better to do that.

 

[Chris Moore]

Although not best practice, I usually just pull it.

Best to offline the disk through the GUI first. Just pulling the disk out can cause the system to crash because there is a swap partition on every disk. There is a way to move the swap to be on a dedicated swap disk instead but that does require some modifications.
When you offline the disk in the GUI, it disables the swap on that disk so it doesn't cause a problem.
The scrolling console you describe is the system crashing.

 

[Chris Moore]

I just looked up the Dell R410 and it looks to only have four drive bays. I guess that means there is an external enclosure that the rest of the drives are in. What hardware is that? It must have an embedded SAS expander because the SFF-8088 only has 4 lanes and you are using 11 drives.

 

[siconic]

I just looked up the Dell R410 and it looks to only have four drive bays. I guess that means there is an external enclosure that the rest of the drives are in. What hardware is that? It must have an embedded SAS expander because the SFF-8088 only has 4 lanes and you are using 11 drives.

The 4 bays on the R410 are all 15k SAS disks, to try and get the most throughput, and keep load off the JBOD. I figured since these disks will be the most active, and at certain points may have a lot of data being read and written, they would be best not on the JBOD. They are as follows: Bay 1 is the FreeNAS main OS disk, Bay 2 is for Plex Transcoding, Bay 3 is for VM`s, and Bay 4 is for SAB (download and upack).

My NAS, Rackables SE3016 JBOD, is really only for storage. Stuff from SAB is copied to it once unpacked, and Plex reads from it for watching TV and Movies. Otherwise, the disks are idle.

Yes, I am running a Rackables SE3016 16 disk JBOD. Love it, and it has been verified to be good up to 4TB disks.

The whole system is a bit outdated, but works for home use, and on my budget, lol. The Rackable SE3016 has been running excellent for the last 4 years. The only thing about it that really sucks, is if power goes out long enough to kill my UPS (about 15 minutes), then the Rackables JBOD does not power back on. Its more or less a dumb box. I did think about a 12 disk server combo, so it will resume last state after a power out, and so I can use the R410 for virtualization with VMWare, but I am not there just yet.

So, since I want to go up to 4TB disks, what would a good card be? Does the card I am using really limit me to 2TB disks, even thought they just "pass through" it?

I need the external SAS, as you can see, because of both the rackable chasis, and the R410 does not really have anywhere on the server where I can run the cable out.

Thanks again!

 

[Chris Moore]

Stuff from SAB is copied to it once unpacked

Code:

Acronym Definition
SAB Scientific Advisory Board
SAB Science Advisory Board (EPA)
SAB Staff Accounting Bulletin
SAB Student Activities Board
SAB School of American Ballet

I don't like acronyms in general, unless I am familiar with them... This one isn't common or Google would have told me what it was.

As to the problem you have, the SAS controller is absolutely a problem that will keep you from getting access to larger drives, you will need a newer one, like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/LSI-9207-8e...HBA/162563989119?_trksid=p2485497.m4902.l9144

You may still have a problem with the SAS expander in that Rackables SE3016, 16 Bay JBOD. The SAS expander must also be able to handle the larger drives and I don't have familiarity with the expander in the Rackables unit. Based on the age, I am guessing it is SAS1, which would indicate it would need to be replaced also.

 

[siconic]

Code:

Acronym Definition
SAB Scientific Advisory Board
SAB Science Advisory Board (EPA)
SAB Staff Accounting Bulletin
SAB Student Activities Board
SAB School of American Ballet

I don't like acronyms in general, unless I am familiar with them... This one isn't common or Google would have told me what it was.

Sorry about that! SabNZBD - Binary Newsreader/downloader

Yeah, above 4TB I will need to upgrade my JBOD, but its good to 4TB disks.

I like that the cards they have already have IT Mode enabled!!! I will be buying one very soon now!

 

[siconic]

As to the problem you have, the SAS controller is absolutely a problem that will keep you from getting access to larger drives, you will need a newer one, like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/LSI-9207-8e...HBA/162563989119?_trksid=p2485497.m4902.l9144

Just got a 3TB SAS, aaaannnndddd:

Did I miss something? I did read that this controller doesnt support over 2TB, soooooo?????

 

[Ericloewe]

It doesn't need to be able to access all 3TB to be able to read the information field that says it's a 3TB drive...

 

[siconic]

Well, I also created a dataset, and moved data to it. Read 2.8 TB... myabe my initla assumption is right, and since I have the controller is passthrough, size doesnt matter. Sure would be a good revelation, these cards are only about $8.

 

[Ericloewe]

Well, if you can access the whole disk, then it's clearly not an LSI SAS1 controller.

 

[Chris Moore]

Did I miss something? I did read that this controller doesnt support over 2TB, soooooo?????

There is supposed to be a problem connecting SATA drives over 2TB to the SAS controller model that you have. I have one of those old controllers at work, on Monday I will try connecting a 4TB SATA drive to it to see what happens.
There may be a significant difference in how the controller handles an actual SAS drive. Never tried it. Since I read the documentation and knew that it was not supposed to support drives larger than 2TB, I got a newer controller before I went to larger drives.
If you are only ever going to go up to 3TB SAS drives, you might be fine with what you have, then again, you may start to have problems when you have about a dozen drives connected.
Your mileage may vary. No warranty, no returns.

 

[siconic]

There is supposed to be a problem connecting SATA drives over 2TB to the SAS controller model that you have. I have one of those old controllers at work, on Monday I will try connecting a 4TB SATA drive to it to see what happens.
There may be a significant difference in how the controller handles an actual SAS drive. Never tried it. Since I read the documentation and knew that it was not supposed to support drives larger than 2TB, I got a newer controller before I went to larger drives.

Just out of curiosity, did you manage to test that out? I was using the disk, no problem, no errors, etc.