FreeNAS Newbie Needing Advice

[David Shinobi]

Hello All!

I am a complete newbie to this and everything I have done so far was through tutorials - online articles and YouTube so please pardon my ignorance.

After years of buying external HD's, one after another, I have ventured into the Big Boys world and decided to build a NAS for my storage purposes.

Enclosed is a picture of my hardware so far, I will be adding more RAM soon but its what came with the motherboard.... Additionally I have 5x4TB WD Enterprise drives.

Everything is up and running however the issue I have run into is when I am trying to set the volume in Raid 5(?), my 4TB drives only show up as 2.2TB.

Am I suppose to format the drives before I install them into the NAS case much like when I have to format them so the whole 4TB's shows in my PC if I was to install them there?









If this part is forbidden, I apologize,
If there is anyone in the Atlanta area that can help finishing the set up and give a crash course (I am a quick study) for me please feel free to let me know, I will compensate for your time of course.

 

[danb35]

No, there's no need to format the disks in any way before using them with FreeNAS--in fact, doing so will give you errors when you try to format them. But where are you seeing that 2.2 TB size? You realize (I hope) that you shouldn't do anything with the motherboard RAID--FreeNAS should handle all the RAID for you.

I'd also add that RAIDZ1 isn't recommended for larger disks (> 1 TB), due to the risk of data corruption on a rebuild.

 

[David Shinobi]

No, there's no need to format the disks in any way before using them with FreeNAS--in fact, doing so will give you errors when you try to format them. But where are you seeing that 2.2 TB size? You realize (I hope) that you shouldn't do anything with the motherboard RAID--FreeNAS should handle all the RAID for you.

I'd also add that RAIDZ1 isn't recommended for larger disks (> 1 TB), due to the risk of data corruption on a rebuild.

Thanks for the reply....

Here are 2 screenshots of where its showing the drives as 2.2TB.
Right now I only have 3 drives installed but they all show the same when installed.

 

[pirateghost]

I'm going to guess the hba you're using doesn't support over 2tb drives

 

[Stux]

Are you using the motherboard Sata connectors?

2.2TiB is a classic limitation in earlier gen sas/Sata equipment.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Hardware spec and freenas version are required for all questions, please provide that information. I bet you are using a sas1 controller and that is what is limiting you to 2.2TB disk sizes.

 

[David Shinobi]

Well, there's my first mistake and I'm sure more to come but thanks to those who pointed out I used the wrong ports, I did not realize there was a difference.... I do now.

All 4TB are now showing up.

 

[Stux]

There wouldn't have been a difference if 2TB was still an unheard of amount of space ;)