FreeNas dont show 21T disk in diskmanagement

[Perino]

I did an installation from scratch of FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x64. The installation was a clear process and the system boots without problems. I decided to go with a Dell R510 Server and a Perc700 Controller which is part of the server. Furthermore the server has 8GB RAM and 8x4TB Harddisks. Because of this hardware sizing, i did an Raid 6 Array which ends up in nearly 22TB of disk capacity. The installation has been done on this diskarray, thinking on partition possibilities after the installation. But there it seems to be a problem. In the graphical management suite of FreeNas, my disk device is not shown. Also in the menue 'view disks', the device is not shown. Therefore Iam not able to add new partitions. A look into the partition table on the command line shows the disk is there:

gpart show mfid0
=> 63 4294967232 mfid0 MBR (21T)
63 1930257 1 freebsd [active] (942M)
1930320 63 - free - (31k)
1930383 1930257 2 freebsd (942M)
3860640 3024 3 freebsd (1.5M)
3863664 41328 4 freebsd (20M)
3904992 4291062303 - free - (2T)

Here I can see the 21T device and some partitions of the FreeNas installation. Iam not familiar with gpart. The question for me is, why it shows only a free area of 2T? Why do we see MBR and not GPT, maybe this would explain that we only see 2T free space. And finally, why is the disk not available in the FreeNas Management view?

thanks, Perino

 

[danb35]

You really need to RTFM and the stickies in the hardware forum--specifically (1) the boot device can only be used to boot, not for storage, and (2) hardware RAID controllers are strongly discouraged. For that matter, if you'd read the screens in the installer, they told you about (1) as well.

 

[Perino]

(1) Of course, i read the manual, but there is no hint about this (pls show me that part in the manual).
(2) This is only true, if you decide to go with ZFS file partitions.

 

[danb35]

Well, I only got about 35 pages into the manual, but I found this:

and this (in section 2.3):

and this:

A $10 USB stick will solve your problem, though it's sounding like a SATA DOM will be a better bet when 9.3 is released. However, 9.3 is also said to drop UFS support, so if you aren't using ZFS you won't be able to upgrade.

 

[Perino]

Thanks. That is a major hint, especiall the last one. But how can I prepare my DELL Server with the right setup? I can only adress 8 HDDs with the storage controller, because they are connected on a backplane. Furthermore, there is a good Raid Controller inside. The problem is, that the controller dont support JBOD. I have read, that some people go with Raid 0 for each disk. But as I understand, this could be result in problems concerning an overlaying ZFS? Additionally, I have only 8GB of RAM and 21TB Storage.

 

[jgreco]

You don't have a good RAID controller inside if it is inside the server. You have a crappy RAID controller. Because any RAID controller that fits inside a server is crappy. Relatively speaking.

The problem is that there is hardware that works, and there's the hardware that works best. From a high level point of view, ZFS is your RAID controller. It has access to eye-melting amounts of memory and CPU resources. When you put a dinky little "hardware" RAID controller after ZFS, you aren't getting anything of value from it, and you may be losing things, even, such as the ability to speak SMART with the drive.

So what you really want to do is to remove the RAID controller and stick in an HBA. It probably uses typical SFF8087 cabling and shouldn't be hard to do.

 

[danb35]

IMO, ZFS is the main reason to use FreeNAS rather than one of the many Linux-based NAS distros (I've played around with XPEnology a little bit, and it's very pretty, but there are lots of options in this market space). To work best, ZFS and FreeNAS want direct access to the disk hardware, which a hardware RAID controller will often deny. ZFS also tends to want a lot of RAM, and you probably don't have enough given your disk capacity (though you should have plenty of room to expand).

I don't have a good answer for you about using your hardware with FreeNAS. If the controller won't support JBOD mode, and can't be re-flashed to a condition that will, it's likely to mask issues with the drives as well, which means you won't get early warning of disk failure. If it's possible to replace that controller with an IBM M1015, that seems to be the popular ticket around here. I'd suggest checking in the hardware subforum to see if there's any way to use your existing controller safely.