Ability to boot from h200 / h310 / etc

[tom__w]

I need to acquire a SAS card for the SATA capabilities. I am looking at H200, H310, etc on eBay. I am looking at units that purport to already be flashed in IT-Mode.

My question is that I need this for the FreeNAS boot drive and I have read that these need to be flashed specifically so they can boot.

Any guidance from the club?

 

[jgreco]

Both of them would need to have the MPTSAS2 BIOS file flashed to them. The approximate command, depending on your environment, is

sas2flsh.exe -b mptsas2.bin

The specific version of the BIOS is not too important, as long as it is just for booting. This works for both IT and IR modes, as well.

 

[Chris Moore]

My question is that I need this for the FreeNAS boot drive

Why do you need / want to boot from the SAS controller? Would you share your hardware plan so we might offer suggestions or alternatives?

 

[tom__w]

Why do you need / want to boot from the SAS controller? Would you share your hardware plan so we might offer suggestions or alternatives?

I have a server with its SATA connections maxed out. i.e. I thought I had 3 free sata connections that I could build a new volume from. Turns out I only have 2 free sata connections. I would like to boot from the SAS / Sata controller, freeing up my third on-board sata.

 

[jgreco]

Why do you need / want to boot from the SAS controller? Would you share your hardware plan so we might offer suggestions or alternatives?

Why would he need a suggestion or alternative? This is a perfectly fine thing to do.

 

[Chris Moore]

Why would he need a suggestion or alternative? This is a perfectly fine thing to do.

I know from personal experience that a SAS controller with no boot firmware allows the system to boot faster. I would suggest using a SATA port for the boot device and using SAS ports for data drives. It is another way to look at the situation. A suggestion. Do what makes you happy, but if I knew what hardware was being used I could make an informed suggestion of a way forward. Perhaps there is already a SAS controller in the system and it might be better to add a SAS expander putting all the drives on the SAS controller, leaving all the SATA ports free to use for a boot drive or a mirrored pair of them.
Options, it is always a good idea to consider them. Still up to the OP to make a decision and do what he wants to do.

 

[Chris Moore]

Besides,
Updated Forum Rules 4/11/17:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/updated-forum-rules-4-11-17.45124/

It is always best to include the hardware description...

 

[tom__w]

I know from personal experience that a SAS controller with no boot firmware allows the system to boot faster. I would suggest using a SATA port for the boot device and using SAS ports for data drives. It is another way to look at the situation. A suggestion. Do what makes you happy, but if I knew what hardware was being used I could make an informed suggestion of a way forward. Perhaps there is already a SAS controller in the system and it might be better to add a SAS expander putting all the drives on the SAS controller, leaving all the SATA ports free to use for a boot drive or a mirrored pair of them.
Options, it is always a good idea to consider them. Still up to the OP to make a decision and do what he wants to do.

Thanks for the input. Options and input are always appreciated. But in my case, I think the solution is straight forward. I just need to free up one sata port .. so adding a SAS card seemed to be the easiest / fastest route. Just wanted to make sure booting from it wasn't an issue.

 

[Chris Moore]

Thanks for the input. Options and input are always appreciated. But in my case, I think the solution is straight forward. I just need to free up one sata port .. so adding a SAS card seemed to be the easiest / fastest route. Just wanted to make sure booting from it wasn't an issue.

My point is, you can put all your data drives on the SAS controller and use a SATA port for booting the system. No need for the boot firmware on the SAS controller which will make it boot much faster.

 

[tom__w]

My point is, you can put all your data drives on the SAS controller and use a SATA port for booting the system. No need for the boot firmware on the SAS controller which will make it boot much faster.

Thanks again for the input. This is a backup box only, used for replication. So speed to boot / etc is of little importance to me. Right now I am looking for the easiest way to add the sata .. and the SAS just might be the quickest.

 

[jgreco]

I know from personal experience that a SAS controller with no boot firmware allows the system to boot faster.

Which is of course a critical concern because you boot your NAS a few dozen times a day...? The extra ~30 seconds shouldn't really be a big issue.

On the other hand, I like to be able to see the list of attached devices before the system boots, as I prefer not to bring up a NAS with failing or failed disks, and it is super-convenient if you're moving disks around or working on multiple systems. Even after a simple power cycle, it is nice to keep an eye on your disk list, because as disks get out into the tens of thousands of hours, successful spinups are a bit questionable.

I would suggest using a SATA port for the boot device and using SAS ports for data drives. It is another way to look at the situation.

The SAS ports on an HBA will be marginally slower than a SATA port, which is also a factor especially with things like SSD's.

 

[HoneyBadger]

The SAS ports on an HBA will be marginally slower than a SATA port, which is also a factor especially with things like SSD's.

You'll also have much better odds of getting functional TRIM support via SATA, if that's a factor.

 

[jgreco]

You'll also have much better odds of getting functional TRIM support via SATA, if that's a factor.

Good point.

I've been doing a lot of 12-bay R510 conversions here lately and they actually disable the onboard SATA ports in the BIOS, and this sucks, as you don't really want to waste the two valuable 2.5" bays on boot (better as SLOG). They do have some internal USB options behind the riser, but they are tricky to access, and USB has proven less-than-ideal on FreeNAS, especially with ZFS. Because these are headed for distant datacenters, I needed something more reliable than USB. So I've been adding in an Addonics AD3M2SPX4 and a Dell H310 controller in IR mode, along with some SATA M.2 SSD's.

It's annoying to me that Dell actually bludgeoned out the SATA ports on the mainboard because this now means these machines are blowing an extra ten watts for no particularly good reason. Obviously TRIM on the boot devices isn't a big deal, but it would be annoying if it were SLOG or L2ARC...

 

[Mannekino]

I recently built a new FreeNAS server from some older parts I managed to aquire for a nice price. I have a Dell PERC H200 flashed in IT mode but not with the boot option. The system boots very fast. I've installed FreeNAS on a two mirrored USB drives. I have one internal USB port on my motherboard and the second USB drive is just stuck in the back. My old FreeNAS server ran from a single USB stick for about 5 years. I had one USB drive failure which caused me to reinstall FreeNAS and then import my storage pools again. This also worked fine I just had to reconfigure FreeNAS itself but it was just my basic home server.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Obviously TRIM on the boot devices isn't a big deal, but it would be annoying if it were SLOG or L2ARC...

OP stated their intention was to add another bit of storage, so it will be top-level vdev disks there; if they're SSD, you definitely want TRIM working unless you're not going to push a lot of writes to it.

Either way, I think @tom__w has the answers he needs here - flash the boot ROM to the HBA, and select the target to boot from in the BIOS.