Anyone has/had Intel S5000PAL mobo with SATA devices unrecognised in FreeNAS?

[rt82]

I bought a server for use with FreeNAS composed of a S5000PAL mobo inside an Intel SR2500AL chassis using a 6 SATA backplane.

The problem is, none of my SATA drives are recognised in FreeNAS.

I am too new with FreeNAS to figure out whether the problem is the lack of support for possibly the backplane in FreeNAS or something wrong with my configuration, possibly outdated firmware etc. I hope that someone who had/has this motherboard can maybe narrow down my problem.

I don't plan to use the built in RAID feature of the motherboard. Whether it is enabled or disabled, I don't see my drives. If RAID is enabled I can see all my sata drives in the RAID configuration setup but not in FreeNAS. I tried booting gparted, which still does not show my drives. I don't know whether I'm looking at a hardware config problem or lack of support because FreeNAS is based on openbsd and gparted on linux which are similar. Below are some of the things I tried:

-enable/disable RAID
-update Bios firmware
-tried enhanced or legacy SATA option in bios
-enable/disable AHCI SATA
-enable/disable SAS controller (not sure if that would affect SATA)

I don't plan to use RAID, but would maybe updating the RAID controller firmware help? I dont want to be updating things that may cause other problems.

Any help is greatly appreciated and thank you.

 

[William Grzybowski]

It is likely FreeBSD version of FreeNAS just doesn't have the drivers for your controller.

You might try FreeBSD 8.3 or 9.0 to make sure that is the case.

 

[b1ghen]

I have a FreeNas 8.0.4 server using 3 WD RE4 2TB drives in a RAIDZ running on a Intel S5000PAL motherboard in a Intel SR1500ALSAS system without problems, I did upgrade all the BIOS and Firmware I could find including the onboard RAID (ESRT2) firmware before installing FreeNas though, not sure if that made a difference or not.

I think I am running it in non RAID mode and can see the SATA disks correctly, it might be that I ran it in RAID mode and made a 1 drive RAID 0 for each drive but I don't think I did. Unfortunately the system is in production use so I can't reboot and check the settings.

One thing about this specific system is that FreeNas hangs completely in intervals of 1-6 weeks and I need to restart the whole box then, I do have it loaded pretty hard doing a lot of compression since I use it mostly to store logfiles and other highly compressible data from several different kind of servers. I transfer about 1TB of data to the box daily. Haven't found a fix to the problem yet.