So we have been testing FreeNAS for use as a SAN/NAS solution for a school division (mostly for off-site backups and for virtual machine images). We're quite happy. In fact, we're so happy that we decided to buy a nice rack mount server that can hold a bunch of drives, can be expanded to hold more, and have installed FreeNAS on it. The server is a Supermicro 6027R-E1R12N that supports 10 drives out of the box, has 4 GigE ports (plus one dedicated to IPMI) and offers an external JBOD port. We are very happy with it...except for one issue: It comes with an LSI hardware RAID controller that doesn't seem to offer a way to treat the drives as just a bunch of ordinary SATA disks.
The controller is an LSI MegaRAID and we've configured each disk as it's own "virtual disk" through the controller. Done this way, FreeNAS just sees a bunch of disks. Maybe there is a trick in the BIOS or the RAID controller configuration that we've missed. I'm not sure. Anyway, this works, but its one more configuration step that I'd rather not go through. In all honesty, if I could buy a replacement LSI card that supported 10 to 12 drives and offered the JBOD support too, I'd snap it up.
I guess I'm wondering if anyone knows of a trick I'm missing to disable the RAID in the MegaRAID or if someone can suggest a possible replacement.
The server is in production now, and therefore difficult to mess with, but we're about to buy an identical server and will have some opportunity to attempt different solutions.
The controller is an LSI MegaRAID and we've configured each disk as it's own "virtual disk" through the controller. Done this way, FreeNAS just sees a bunch of disks. Maybe there is a trick in the BIOS or the RAID controller configuration that we've missed. I'm not sure. Anyway, this works, but its one more configuration step that I'd rather not go through. In all honesty, if I could buy a replacement LSI card that supported 10 to 12 drives and offered the JBOD support too, I'd snap it up.
I guess I'm wondering if anyone knows of a trick I'm missing to disable the RAID in the MegaRAID or if someone can suggest a possible replacement.
The server is in production now, and therefore difficult to mess with, but we're about to buy an identical server and will have some opportunity to attempt different solutions.