Possible Build

[Tom Stevens]

We have three Freenas storage servers currently in use, and we are finding it Great.

We are in the process of putting in a forth After which we are looking at Re-using and old MSA 2000 G2 (2012i) with and Disk Enclosure.

What we are thinking of doing is
1. Swapping out the Iscsi Controllers for SAS, and Attaching one of them to a LSI HBA with an external Port, Connected to a Freenas Box with 2-4 SSD Cards. 128GB RAM. and either Presenting the disk Straight up to freenas in pass thru Mode or Creating two RAID0 Arrays and presenting these up and creating a Mirror, with 1-2 disk for Red Cache and 1 for Write.
2. Present the Disks up via ISCSI.
3. Connect the Disk Enclosure to the HBA.

Question is option three Supported/Work

 

[jgreco]

If it is simply a disk shelf, it should be fine. If there's an actual controller in the shelf, that might be a problem. You want FreeNAS to have direct access to the drives, specifically including SMART error reporting. My recollection is that the MSA2000's have a controller but that it can be configured to get out of the way. I don't have one available to play with.