Dell R510 8-Bay Raid on internal SATA ports

[matulano]

Hi

So I have an R510 8-Bay server and going to run TrueNAS on it. I replaced the H700 controller it came with, with a H200 flashed to IT mode. The trays are all filled with 12TB drivers and will be set up as Raid Z2, since this machine will only be used to make backups of the other systems in the rack.

Now the known issue with using all 8 drives in this system is adding 2 more drives for the TrueNAS OS itself. I am looking to add 2 SSDs in RAID 1. The problem is that there is absolutely no way to source power for the drives without splitting some existing power cables. There are a few threads even on the internet and this board itself with solutions for that, like @jgreco Cool Hardware Post.

I decided to go that route too, as it's the cleanest solution and not that expensive. However I am thorn between 2 options now. The first one is the Startech (PEXM2SAT32N1) or DeLock (89518) which are the same and the second option would be to go with the same type of card that has an integrated Raid 0/1 controller like the DeLock (89388).

I would rather take the first option, as I might be wanting to add an NVME for L2ARC further down the line and those cards would allow me to do so rather comfortable. However I am not sure if it's possible to configure the onboard sata ports as Raid 1 in the BIOS of the R510.

Has anybody successfully tried to setup RAID 1 on the internal SATA ports of the 8-Bay R510?

 

[jgreco]

Cheesy Windows/PC based "RAID" controllers typically do not work with non-Windows OS's.

You are probably lucky. The 12-bay R510 configuration disables the onboard SATA entirely, in the BIOS, and so when we've done retrofits of those in the past, the usual dodge is to add a Dell PERC H310 along with the dual SATA+single NVMe card you mention. If you flash the H310 to LSI IR mode, it can provide native RAID functionality that is compatible with TrueNAS, but it may still be a better idea to just have ZFS handle the mirroring. Since you have the onboard SATA, I think that's the way I'd prefer to go if I could.

 

[matulano]

You are right, I made a thinking mistake. There is actually no need for me to setup RAID1 to install TrueNAS onto. I can just create a RAID 1 during the TrueNAS install on those drives from the adapter card, right?

 

[jgreco]

Well, my point is that you probably want ZFS to set up a mirror.

 

[matulano]

Yeah, that's what I meant. I wasn't sure if I can atually create a ZFS mirror during install. Thanks for the help.

 

[jgreco]

Yup. Highly common config.

The main problem here is that the PC BIOS sucks, and does not really reliably recover from faulted devices in some cases (or, for cheap mainboards, in ANY cases).

There is a certain happiness to using a Dell PERC H310 in IR mode with a RAID1 mirror provided by the LSI IR firmware. This is known to "fail over" correctly when there are problems like bad sectors. However, ZFS is unable to recover from data errors, because the virtual disk that gets created does not provide access to the underlying redundancy.

On the other hand, a failing SATA BIOS type device, which goes bad, but not bad enough to register ineligibility as a boot device with the mainboard BIOS, can also hose up booting.

It is very much a "pick yer poison" scenario.

We really need to get ZFS put into PC BIOS

 

[matulano]

Thanks for the additional information, appreciate it! I will definitely use ZFS mirror.