Thoughts on a 3ware Promise 8 Port IDE Raid card Escalade 7810 install

[tauras911]

Hi all,

Brand new to Truenas, but have some experience with servers and tech.

I have this old 3ware promise card I was trying to use to load up my old IDE drives for some cold storage through Truenas. It works great and I was using it on Windows 2008 server for years. I was expecting to set the drives as "just a bunch of disks". Would this works as a pass through or would the raid card still control them? I also noticed that my Truenas install does not see the controller automagically, so I would need help installing the driver for this controller. Not sure how to go about that. =) Fairly new to FreeBSD and command line.

If this controller is just too old or this is just not a great idea, lol... please recommend a HBA controller.
I have a pcie16x, pcie 2x, and a pci(I think think 6x) slot available. My motherboard is a Asus P5N-E SLI, with 8GB memory, Intel Core 2 Quad Cpu Q66600 @2.40Ghz
Not the fastest ship in the galaxy, but she'll get me there...

Thank you for your time and expertise!

T

 

[jgreco]

FreeNAS and TrueNAS are appliances, and while it is possible to sledgehammer in a driver, it's not recommended and not the intended use case. If it doesn't do what you need out of the box, it's probably not going to be particularly compatible.

3Ware was among the worst offenders for "JBOD" hackery and is one of the primary motivators for my having written

https://www.truenas.com/community/r...bas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.139/

which you should go read. In any case, it does not appear that there is a driver that supports the 7810 card, which is good, because even if the twe driver supported it, I would not suggest trying to use it. So I suspect you are out of luck with that card.

There is nothing that I am aware of that is a particularly promising path forward for IDE drives. There are a number of PATA-to-SATA translator boards that are probably the closest thing. Unfortunately, ZFS is **extremely** hard on its I/O subsystem and disks, and tends to be very good at teasing out obscure problems that might not appear under much less strenuous Windows usage.