Has anyone used SAS or NLSAS drives with freenas?

[BobJ]

I have 2 extra Seagate Constellation ES ST31000424SS that I was going to put in a NAS.

I've tried three raid controllers HP212, Perc6ir, Perc h310 (IT LSI flash) and tried to set up a raid 1 ZFS pool.

The drives show up but initialization fails or stalls when making the zpool.

Is this just a waste of time or does someone here have a working NAS using SAS drives and controller.

 

[pirateghost]

I have 18 constellation 3tb in my freenas. They work fine.

 

[depasseg]

I've got 12 working fine.

 

[BobJ]

Do you think its my controllers are too old for my NL SAS drives? I see one of you is using a new LSI 3008 SAS3 controller. I think mine is LSI SAS2008.

I read somewhere that the Raid card prevents SMART commands to pass through. Any issues? After 3 controllers I sort of lost hope for these drives.

 

[sfcredfox]

I'm using a bunch of SAS drives in a drive enclosure and a SAS controller.

I have no experience with Dell's Perc's. I am using an HP 221 (LSI 9205-8e) and the IBM M1015 (LSI 9211-8i I think). Both controllers are working perfectly. Everything I hear is RAID controllers are like drugs...drugs are bad....mmkaaayyy.

Tried a real HBA?
Breakout cable?
Can you read/write from them with DD testing?

 

[BobJ]

What is a "REAL HBA"?
What is a fake HBA?
I don't know what an HBA is. I just call them raid cards.

I am using a mini SAS breakout cable. One end plugs into the card other end to the drives. I have different cables. The issues I ran into were.
- Drives show up in controller but were BLOCKED. I think this was because there were not DELL certified. There are the same drive Dell uses just not dell firmware.
- Drives show up but for some reason can't be hardware raided. HP212.
- I flashed the HP and the Percs to LSI firmware so it would bypass Dells goofy BLOCK out.
- They can be formatted from the Raid controller, I did it and no issues. I did not perform any other tests. I was trying to get them to raid up in NAS4free and Freenas. The drives show up on the list and I can prepare them for ZFS pool. I can make a VD device. But when I try to make the ZFS raid 1 pool it errors on initialization. I gave up and just put two WD SATA reds in. So its running fine. But would like to use these SAS drives since they are brand new. Right now they are in a box collecting dust.

The H310 should work, Dells uses these drives with it. I will have to see if I can do some sea tools test on them. I think its some kind of incompatibility with the card and drives.

 

[sfcredfox]

What is a "REAL HBA"?
What is a fake HBA?
I don't know what an HBA is. I just call them raid cards.

There is a key difference. You need to research this a little. My simple version is an HBA allows direct access to each single disk with no 'junk' in the way, just disk. A RAID controller may have an 'HBA Mode', but FreeNAS/ZFS sometimes still doesn't like that depending on what the card considers HBA mode. My over simple explaination of a RAID controller in this regard is a card that wants to own the disk itself, and then present something to the OS, like a volume. The card gets between the OS and the drives in some fashion.

There's much better explainations out there, FreeNAS hates RAID controllers, loves HBAs.

#1 Rule of FreeNAS = No hardware RAID.
I'd be shocked if you used one of the community accepted HBAs and still had problems.

 

[depasseg]

- Drives show up but for some reason can't be hardware raided. HP212.

You shouldn't be trying to do hardware raid. Think of an HBA like a lot of SATA/SAS ports on your motherboard. That's all it does. You might see references to card that have IR firmware (Integrated RAID), which is not what you want to use. Fortunately, many of the vendors of those cards also provide IT firmware (Integrated Target) which can be flashed turning a RAID card into a Real HBA.

 

[HoneyBadger]

The PERC H310 should work, possibly even natively. I've used the PERC H200 without issue in the past (just make sure the firmware matches up!)

The HP P212 and PERC 6i/R should be avoided as they can't do JBOD/passthrough mode, and a bunch of RAID0 volumes is not the same thing.

 

[BobJ]

Ok, yes I understand what you mean by HBA I just did not know the nomenclature. I understand the reason and concept or why its is better for a sortware nas. You just need a passthrough and not all the extra RAID functions that the software will be doing.

I did try the IT mode of the perc 6 and HP. With the IT firmware they are basically a pass through. So this would be a FAKE HBA? as its been hacked to act like a true HBA.

I when I saw dell using H310s and my drives (same drive just dell bios) I thought I would give one more try. They came up BLOCKED.

Never had these compatibility issues with SATA. I like SAS because they have nicer features and bidirectional, better MTF rates. Seems to be issues with standardization with the cards and drives.

A Host Bus Adapter Controller (HBA) should be cheaper than a raid card, they do less, think less. What is the best bang for the buck HBA that might work?

I maybe try a different flash on the H310 as it should work. I don't need any more speed than it can provide. I would only be doing raid 1 or 10.
if they can do around 100MB/sec is good enough for me.

 

[depasseg]

I did try the IT mode of the perc 6 and HP. With the IT firmware they are basically a pass through. So this would be a FAKE HBA? as its been hacked to act like a true HBA

No, this would be HBA. Fake would be using IR mode and putting each drive in it's own HW raid and then presenting that to freenas.

I think you are running into problems at the HW layer that don't have anything to do with Freenas. That Dell card and the Blocked status doesn't sound good.

Read the newbie guide by cyberjock. The M1015 or similar are well liked HBA's.

 

[BobJ]

"I think you are running into problems at the HW layer that don't have anything to do with Freenas."

I totally agree with this and came to the same conclusion after testing both freenas and nas4free. But the hardware gurus would be here (I hoped) the ones that have tried it and know more than me. And I thank you for your insights and information.

 

[Ericloewe]

No, this would be HBA. Fake would be using IR mode and putting each drive in it's own HW raid and then presenting that to freenas.

<Moment of pedantry>
IR supports everything IT does, plus HW RAID. Strictly speaking, IR is generally fine, but perhaps a bit slower and more susceptible to bugs. The real danger is the SAS2 real HW RAID firmware from the SAS 9240s and similar.
</pedantry>

 

[JDCynical]

I when I saw dell using H310s and my drives (same drive just dell bios) I thought I would give one more try. They came up BLOCKED

IIRC, Dell did this very early on, blocking any drive that was not marked in the drive firmware as Dell approved.

They quickly removed this on later card firmware revisions.

However, I would suggest reading up at this page: https://techmattr.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/sas-hba-crossflashing-or-flashing-to-it-mode/

Alternately, use your search engine of choice and read up on "h310 crossflash" to get rid of the Dell firmware on the card.

Disclaimer: I have not does this process myself, but it's well documented as a working process.

 

[BobJ]

[QUOTE="
However, I would suggest reading up at this page: https://techmattr.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/sas-hba-crossflashing-or-flashing-to-it-mode/.[/QUOTE]

Oh, I already flashed the h310 to IT mode LSI SAS3081E. Removed the bios too. So its just a HBA. Still would not ZFS the pair of drives.

But I could try a different LSI firmware.

 

[BobJ]

Well I just re-flashed the h310 using one of the guides to IT mode. When I boot it says adapter disabled by user. Which I take means its raid functions are disabled by the user. I can see the drives in the adapters bios and also from within the nas tools.

I can see them in the nas and prepare them for a zfspool device but when I try to make the mirror it hangs on initialization as usual.

root: cannot create 'SeagatePool': invalid argument for this pool operation
Sep 5 16:05:13 nas4freedell root: zpool create -m /mnt/SeagatePool SeagatePool mirror /dev/da0 /dev/da1
Sep 5 16:04:37 nas4freedell smbd[1950]: Could not find child 5303 -- ignoring

Just wondering if these drives will ever be of use. Brand new, SAS drives that I can't get to join a mirror.

 

[BobJ]

I might have messed up something on the flash. At first the controller come up disabled. Then I went into the bios and choose a drive for a boot device and rebooted. It then came up enabled but on the h310 initialization on boot it said "controller in slot1 does not have its SAS address configured"

I did this command before the flash.
megaoem -adpallinfo -a0 > allinfo.txt

when i looked at that text file it did not list the sas address, had an error.

So how do I find the sas address?

the command to write it is sas2flsh -sasadd (addresss)

in the controller cntr-c bios it listed a address of 50000000:80000000

I am a bit clueless on finding the address and writing it to the h310.

Anyone?

 

[BobJ]

Strange when I run the megaoem -adpallinfo -a0 > allinfo.txt

it gives a "Mouse initialization failed error" then it exits so it gives no information. How do I get it to bypass a mouse check?

Here is a screen shot of the h310s bios I flashed to. I might have to pull the card again, but there is not a sticker on it. So not sure how to find the SAS address.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Didn't read the whole thread but usually the address is on a sticker on the card so you can read it even if you wiped it in the software.

 

[survive]

Hi BobJ,

I'm just catching up on the thread here and the first thing that stuck out is that you flashed an LSI SAS3081E firmware to an H310? If so that's totally not the right firmware to use because the 3081 is a previous-generation 1068 chip.

You want cross-flash instructions for an LSI2008-based controller.

Give this:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...sion-20-for-dev-mps0.36536/page-8#post-225516

A look & see if that doesn't sort you out (assuming you did flash the wrong firmware).

-Will