Considering Buying used HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8, looking for advice on the RAID card and TrueNas Scale compatibility

[PsychoAlex]

Hi All,

Looking for some general advice on a HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 from Bargain Hardware. I am currently using a rather old i5 mini-atx system with 8gb of ram and a random collection of old 1TB HDDs connected to a LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i that I have flashed to IT mode.

I am running currently using it to run a Jellyfin container, which is working fantastically. However, as I was limited in resources and mostly wanting to give Scale a good try, my drives are setup as a Stripe with no redundancy and I have very limited RAM. So I am looking to drop some cash on an older server platform and build a proper homelab out of it, been on my wish list for years.

What I would like some advice on specifically:

Is the p420i compatible with Scale out of the box? All of the information I have found on it on the forums are either for older versions of Core or from pre-2018
Is the P420i 2GB FBWC (SAS/SATA) RAID Kit as an option the best route to go, or should I grab another LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i, flash it as well, then use the two of them instead?

I have already done some searching, and it appears the P420i does support some form of HBA passthrough however I cannot find anything concrete. Dropping this amount of cash is obviously a somewhat significant investment for a homelab and I want to make sure it's possible before I pull the trigger.

Any other suggestions and advice welcome.

 

[jgreco]

Is the p420i compatible with Scale out of the box?

No, of course not.

All of the information I have found on it on the forums are either for older versions of Core or from pre-2018

Go to the upper left hand corner with the search magnifying glass. Click. Then type "p420i" in the search box. You can manually look at a number of results from this and last year, including several where I clearly say things such as

The P420i isn't compatible. https://www.truenas.com/community/r...bas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.139/

You can use the 9240-8i crossflashed to IT mode, though that's potentially wasting money when you could just acquire a 9211-8i.

 

[PsychoAlex]

Thanks for the response, however I was under the impression that Scale is built on Debian, and is substantially different to Core which is based on FreeBSD. So I was searching the Scale subforums specifically.

This is pretty much what I thought the case would be, however I thought it best to check. I can offload my current dataset to a third system and re-use the LSI on the new server when it comes to it.

I honestly cannot find any 9211-8i's cheaper than the 9240-8i which I picked up for £30.

 

[Arwen]

In the case of RAID cards verses HBA cards, it is a ZFS thing, not the OS.