Dell poweredge r320 integrated SAS/SATA

[charvey]

I got a used dell poweredge r320 with an H310 mini not knowing that the mini would not cross flash. I'm looking for a way around this. I see two options:

• Plug the disks into an onboard SAS plug labelled SATA-A_D
• Get a freenas approved HBA or IT mode controller off ebay.

I've tried the SATA-A_D options and it seems to work with SATA drives, but not the SAS ones that came with the server.

The server came with 4x600GB drives, so I think that in the end I'm going to get an ebay controller to avoid having to get new disks for now. That still leaves me with 2 questions:

What's the cheapest ebay option for 4 5200RPM drives?
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Dell-H310-6...e-Low-Profile-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/162903881137

How can I tell if the integrated controller (SATA-A_D) is safe? I know nothing about the controller, I can't find much in the owner's manual or on the dell website.

thanks,
Chris

 

[charvey]

One more question: If I put my H310 mini into non-raid mode, will that prevent data corruption? I tried freenas in that configuration and it works fine on the surface. I don't know how to validate the setup and make sure it's rock solid in the face of power outages and write caching, or whatever else breaks ZFS.

 

[Ender117]

I tried H310 mini on a bare metal install of FreeNAS on r620, so I think most of my experiences applies:

1. IOPS cap. I was able to saturate the card with 2 S3500. Still may not be a problem if you are using HDD.
   
   
2. Drives will show up as mfisyspdX for passthrough/non-raid drives. I heard that mfi driver in FreeBSD is buggy.
   
   
3. You cannot directly use smartctl on mfisyspdX, instead you need to use /dev/passX. You need to figure out the X yourself because it's not always the same in mfisyspdX
   
   
4. For SATA drives, you need to add -d sat for smartctl commands, otherwise it would error out. Even then it has problem reading some values.
   
   
5. For obvious reason smart monitoring won't work out of box. You need to write a init script to modify smartd.conf at the very least.