DL380G8 - 8SFF - HBA Mode…

[JohnsHCL44]

So about a year back - I finally installed TrueNAS onto my DL380G8 that I have which includes 8x 300Gb 10k SAS drives. However at this point knowing that the max drive supported on the 420 card (which is in HBA mode) is 1.2Gb (at a crazy price) I figure going with a LSI SAS 9300-8i controller and some “normal” 2.5” drives might be best.

As a long time lurker here - I think I’m good to go with this and even go with a hybrid approach of the first 2 drives being SSD and then the rest as HDD to get the best config. What I’m wondering is that can that LSI controller interface into the HP 8 drive SFF cage and then allow me to use regular SSD and HDDs in the system or does the actual cage prevent me from using them? Obviously they won’t be hot swappable and such going forward and are now “regular old” drives I’m using or have others used those regular consumer laptop drives and I just ran into TrueNas not liking me putting in a new drive when I did a test swap of things a few months back?

If this has been asked - my apologies but I did do a search to see if this was discussed on this level. And again this is 100% for home use and not intended to be used except for backups and run a few jails/VMs for simple services I run at home here.

 

[jgreco]

While I don't have a DL380G8 handy to check, it is very common for standard connectors to be used for attaching RAID controllers.

You should absolutely get rid of the P420 card; see

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

and there is no "HBA mode" -- lobotomizing the RAID functionality just makes it a moron-grade RAID controller, not an HBA.

Please do head on over to the SAS Primer if you are unfamiliar with the cabling --

Don't be afraid to be SAS-sy ... a primer on basic SAS and SATA

With the introduction of SAS 12Gbps, seems like "it's time" to do a braindump on SAS. Work in progress, as usual. History By the late '90's, SCSI and PATA were the dominant technologies to attach disks. Both were parallel bus multiple drop topologies and this kind of sucked. SATA and Serial...

www.truenas.com

I expect that the P420 is a 6Gbps controller with a pair of SFF-8087 connectors on it. I also suspect that your DL380 backplane has a pair of SFF-8087 cables. This would make an LSI 9300-8i a bad choice, because of the different connectors, but you CAN get SFF-8643-to-SFF-8087 replacement cables and that would be expected to work. There are a number of LSI 9211-8i type cards such as the Dell PERC H310 which would be very close to a drop-in replacement with SFF-8087's on them. They'll be a bit slower than the 9300-8i though.

 

[Arwen]

@JohnsHCL44 - One word of caution, many of the higher density SATA 2.5" drives use SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR drives are particularly un-suited for ZFS in any RAID configuration.

Plus, their is a known problem with Western Digital Red drives. (The new Red, not the old Reds which got relabeled as Red Plus. Someone needs to punish WD for this stupidity of re-naming...) The new Reds will throw read errors because of a firmware bug that only ZFS seems to trigger. It's a silly bug that I did not experience with my Seagate 8TB Archive SMR drive, which I use with ZFS. It seems ZFS will bundle reads of 2 near by blocks of disk storage into a single read. But, if the in-between block(s) have never been written, the new WD Red throws a sector not found error. Stupid.

---

To be fair on the subject of SMR disks. I own 2, one the previously mentioned Seagate 8TB Archive, which I use for backups. It's quite slow doing the backups. Or for that mater, performing the pre-backup scrub. But, at the time it was the cheapest 8TB disk I could find, (or only 8TB disk...) It works for my use as does a 2.5" 2TB laptop type drive in my media server, (also with ZFS).

 

[dhenzler]

So about a year back - I finally installed TrueNAS onto my DL380G8 that I have which includes 8x 300Gb 10k SAS drives. However at this point knowing that the max drive supported on the 420 card (which is in HBA mode) is 1.2Gb (at a crazy price) I figure going with a LSI SAS 9300-8i controller and some “normal” 2.5” drives might be best.

As a long time lurker here - I think I’m good to go with this and even go with a hybrid approach of the first 2 drives being SSD and then the rest as HDD to get the best config. What I’m wondering is that can that LSI controller interface into the HP 8 drive SFF cage and then allow me to use regular SSD and HDDs in the system or does the actual cage prevent me from using them? Obviously they won’t be hot swappable and such going forward and are now “regular old” drives I’m using or have others used those regular consumer laptop drives and I just ran into TrueNas not liking me putting in a new drive when I did a test swap of things a few months back?

If this has been asked - my apologies but I did do a search to see if this was discussed on this level. And again this is 100% for home use and not intended to be used except for backups and run a few jails/VMs for simple services I run at home here.

I have four DL380G8 machines, three are e models and one is a p. I installed a HBA controller that comes on the RISER used at the right rear of the chassis. 684896-001 HP B320i Riser w/SAS Connectors Controller I bought them for like $13 -$18 over a period of a year. They're still out there, and make your DL380eG8 into a fantastic TrueNAS Core machine.

 

[dhenzler]

@JohnsHCL44 - One word of caution, many of the higher density SATA 2.5" drives use SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR drives are particularly un-suited for ZFS in any RAID configuration.

Plus, their is a known problem with Western Digital Red drives. (The new Red, not the old Reds which got relabeled as Red Plus. Someone needs to punish WD for this stupidity of re-naming...) The new Reds will throw read errors because of a firmware bug that only ZFS seems to trigger. It's a silly bug that I did not experience with my Seagate 8TB Archive SMR drive, which I use with ZFS. It seems ZFS will bundle reads of 2 near by blocks of disk storage into a single read. But, if the in-between block(s) have never been written, the new WD Red throws a sector not found error. Stupid.

---

To be fair on the subject of SMR disks. I own 2, one the previously mentioned Seagate 8TB Archive, which I use for backups. It's quite slow doing the backups. Or for that mater, performing the pre-backup scrub. But, at the time it was the cheapest 8TB disk I could find, (or only 8TB disk...) It works for my use as does a 2.5" 2TB laptop type drive in my media server, (also with ZFS).

What about Seagate ST3000NM0035 3TB 7.2k 12Gb/s 3.5" SAS Hard Drive SED ? Are they good to use..???

 

[Arwen]

What about Seagate ST3000NM0035 3TB 7.2k 12Gb/s 3.5" SAS Hard Drive SED ? Are they good to use..???

Don't know.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I have four DL380G8 machines, three are e models and one is a p. I installed a HBA controller that comes on the RISER used at the right rear of the chassis. 684896-001 HP B320i Riser w/SAS Connectors Controller I bought them for like $13 -$18 over a period of a year. They're still out there, and make your DL380eG8 into a fantastic TrueNAS Core machine.

While it's better than a PMC Microsemi card, the B320i is still based on the SAS2108 "MegaRAID" chipset - it's a riser with an embedded LSI 9260-8i in it. Perhaps someone will find a way to "de-RAID" it similar to the PERC H710 series, but in its current format it's still not an HBA unfortunately.

Great little component though if hardware RAID is what you need.

What about Seagate ST3000NM0035 3TB 7.2k 12Gb/s 3.5" SAS Hard Drive SED ? Are they good to use..???

Safe, CMR explicitly confirmed in datasheet and even Seagate isn't putting SMR into SAS (... yet?)

https://www.seagate.com/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/ent-cap-3-5-hdd-data-sheetDS1882-2-1606US-en_US.pdf