Having seen the SAS thread I thought I'd have a go. Salvaged some parts, including an Adaptec 5445Z, a Xyratex HD-1235 disk shelf, some disks and an SFF-8088 cable. The Adaptecs have JBOD -> simple volumes. I'm doing this in an HP Microserver N54L, stock except for 16gig ECC RAM.
At boot time I can enter the Adaptec array manager and see the disks in the shelf and set them to JBODs. But they're not showing in FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE-U1. They do show up as DOS-style letters early in the bootup, but rather later is this:
Jan 21 18:09:42 freenas aac0: <Adaptec RAID Controller> mem 0xfe600000-0xfe7fffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci2
Jan 21 18:09:42 freenas aac0: FATAL: controller kernel panicdevice_attach: aac0attach returned 6
repeated a couple of times. Bad spacing on the FATAL line is as seen, this is copy/pasted from /var/log/messages.
The 5445 is declared supported in 11.2's native aac driver.
Googling shows very very few hits around this, searching against freenas and freebsd - so few that it makes me think I'm getting an abnormal result. One saying "yeah, the aac driver is poorly maintained, that'll happen", one thread here where it only hit someone when they put a second Adaptec in their system.
Anyone running a 5-series Adaptec controller successfully? Anyone had this issue and fixed it, or given up? I have updated the 5445Z's firmware to the latest.
Alternatively... what's an appropriate HBA, low profile with at least one internal SFF-8087 and an external SFF-8088 connector? I can't find one in the LSI model tree but there's so many!
At boot time I can enter the Adaptec array manager and see the disks in the shelf and set them to JBODs. But they're not showing in FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE-U1. They do show up as DOS-style letters early in the bootup, but rather later is this:
Jan 21 18:09:42 freenas aac0: <Adaptec RAID Controller> mem 0xfe600000-0xfe7fffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci2
Jan 21 18:09:42 freenas aac0: FATAL: controller kernel panicdevice_attach: aac0attach returned 6
repeated a couple of times. Bad spacing on the FATAL line is as seen, this is copy/pasted from /var/log/messages.
The 5445 is declared supported in 11.2's native aac driver.
Googling shows very very few hits around this, searching against freenas and freebsd - so few that it makes me think I'm getting an abnormal result. One saying "yeah, the aac driver is poorly maintained, that'll happen", one thread here where it only hit someone when they put a second Adaptec in their system.
Anyone running a 5-series Adaptec controller successfully? Anyone had this issue and fixed it, or given up? I have updated the 5445Z's firmware to the latest.
Alternatively... what's an appropriate HBA, low profile with at least one internal SFF-8087 and an external SFF-8088 connector? I can't find one in the LSI model tree but there's so many!
Last edited: