BUILD Hardware check for big FreeNAS box

[KevinM]

What RAID controller? That platform has an LSI 2308 in IT mode. It was like they *made* it for ZFS. :)

But assuming you meant "HBA" and mistyped "RAID controller"... That would seem to be a function of how you choose to connect the expanders to the host, rather than any inherent thing. You can certainly attach to two separate HBA's if there's a PCIe bus bandwidth issue. When you're spending this much on a storage server, no one will blink at paying a few hundred extra for an additional HBA and maybe a cable.

I sure wouldn't. I'm actually thinking of waiting until 9.10 comes out so I can go with the E1CR36L and SAS3. I still think it's not a bad idea to get a second 3008. HBAs are pretty cheap in the big scheme of things, and if a card died I'd be able to get the pool back online pretty quickly.

Once I get these boxes in production I'm going to refresh the two existing E1R36N boxes. They're currently running 8.3.2 on 9207 HBAs. After I migrate the data to the new boxes I'm going to upgrade them to 9.3-current, 10GB Ethernet and swap out the SSDs. I'm thinking I should get a couple more 9207s for those also.

 

[jgreco]

HBAs are pretty cheap in the big scheme of things, and if a card died I'd be able to get the pool back online pretty quickly.

And there's that. Though I'd be a little more afraid of other random failures in the platform (backplane failed/connector broke, power distribution board failed, motherboard failed, etc)

 

[KevinM]

And there's that. Though I'd be a little more afraid of other random failures in the platform (backplane failed/connector broke, power distribution board failed, motherboard failed, etc)

I don't disagree at all. I have found though that it's easy to sell redundancy in a corporate environment. If it's cheap and might offer some performance benefit, I'm all for it.

 

[Ericloewe]

I sure wouldn't. I'm actually thinking of waiting until 9.10 comes out so I can go with the E1CR36L and SAS3

Don't let SAS3 hold you. FreeNAS 9.3.1 has had mpr P9 (or whatever it was) backported, so it's the same as FreeNAS 9.10.

 

[jgreco]

Don't let SAS3 hold you. FreeNAS 9.3.1 has had mpr P9 (or whatever it was) backported, so it's the same as FreeNAS 9.10.

Yeah. The SAS3 stuff is probably okay, but the thing is that there's probably cumulatively more than a billion hours of problem-free operation with the SAS2 compared to the mere millions of hours on the SAS3 stuff, so we're just a lot more confident in the SAS2 stuff.