Hello all... my first build.

[Mkubiak402]

Hi name here is matt.. Ill have a lot of questions about freeNAS soon.
but for now i am getting my feet wet on 4 160gb test drives befor i put the big ones in..
Right now i am running windows 2011 home server it is good but dont like the way it works outside of the home when working with it over the internet so i am giving FreeNAS a shot..
The server i am running now
Msi AM3 main board.
AMD Athlon x2
4GB of DDR3
Adaptec 6805 8 port sata raid controller..
4-WD RED 3TB HDD raid 10
2-WD BLACK 2TB raid 1
2-WD GREEN 1TB RAID 1

The new server when ready will be
SUPERMICRO X8DTE-F Dual LGA 1366
2x intel xeon e5620 @2.4ghz
24gb ddr3 EEC bufferd
16GB thumb drive < for os
Adaptec 6805E 8 port sata raid controller.. from old server
Need a Power sypply 800~1,000 watts
Need Norco RPC-4020 20bay 4U server case
6WD 3TB red raid ??
2Wd 2tb black raid 1
I may or may not use the green may give them to a friend..

 

[Mkubiak402]

fixed some spelling was not a good idea to type it all on my phone at work...

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Welcome!

for now i am getting my feet wet on 4 160gb test drives befor i put the big ones in..

Excellent approach :)

6WD 3TB red raid ??

RAIDZ2. See @BigDave 's signature for confirmation ;)

 

[BigDave]

See @BigDave 's signature for confirmation

I was wondering if you had seen that ;)

 

[BigDave]

@Mkubiak402
I looked on the supported hardware list and failed to find
your controller card. You might want to rethink using that model.

Adaptec 6805E 8 port sata raid controller

 

[Fuganater]

Get and LSI 9211-8i for your HBA.

I also reccomend getting a second thrumb drive and mirror you OS installation on them.

 

[nightshade00013]

Look at the x8dt6-f board instead. It will come with a SAS controller built in. If you haven't purchased the board already you will likely find that the cost difference between the x8dte-f and the x8dt6-f is much less than the cost of a controller card. You will then have 6 sata ports and 8 SAS ports with minimal cost compared to a board plus controller.

Adaptec 6805E 8 port sata raid controller..

As far as this goes.... no, no , no , no. It is a raid card and will only give you trouble with FreeNAS.

Mirrored USB drives will be a good feature to have.

Don't forget a UPS/Battery Backup.

If you don't already have the board and case then take a look on Ebay for it in a 4u case. May find one basically together with most everything that you will need including a power supply. Like this one would not give you 20 drives but 12 will do two 6 drive vDev's and have 96GB of ram along with cpu and psu. It's a 2U but unless you plan to do a lot of vDev's and extravagant things it should work well. Basically add some drives and install FreeNAS.

 

[Mkubiak402]

Look at the x8dt6-f board instead. It will come with a SAS controller built in. If you haven't purchased the board already you will likely find that the cost difference between the x8dte-f and the x8dt6-f is much less than the cost of a controller card. You will then have 6 sata ports and 8 SAS ports with minimal cost compared to a board plus controller.


As far as this goes.... no, no , no , no. It is a raid card and will only give you trouble with FreeNAS.

Mirrored USB drives will be a good feature to have.

Don't forget a UPS/Battery Backup.

If you don't already have the board and case then take a look on Ebay for it in a 4u case. May find one basically together with most everything that you will need including a power supply. Like this one would not give you 20 drives but 12 will do two 6 drive vDev's and have 96GB of ram along with cpu and psu. It's a 2U but unless you plan to do a lot of vDev's and extravagant things it should work well. Basically add some drives and install FreeNAS.

the X8DTE-F is what i have now $75 on eBay i am getting it 1 part at a time cant make a jump on $900 at 1 time... so the only thing i need now is a case and a good PSU and a new RAID card ...
Bummer on the Adaptec 6805E it is the card i have in my windows server right now... I did have an LSI card before that but it was DOA :( I may sell it and look in to the LSI cards then..
x2 on the thumb drive backup i am going to get 1 more 16gig drive.

I forgot to add i do have a UPS/Battery Backup it is an Eaton don't have the model number but it runs on 4 12V battery's

 

[Mkubiak402]

took a look on ebay look like i might get lucky and brake even if i get the LSI 9211-8i

 

[nightshade00013]

An alternative to the 9211-8i is the IBM ServeRaid M1015

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/confused-about-that-lsi-card-join-the-crowd.11901/

 

[Mkubiak402]

OK so ill keep a look out for 2 {9211-8i} or a {IBM ServeRaid M1015}
This will set me back a little but i am not planning on having this up and running till April 2016
so the way it looks to me is i wont even be using the card as even a RAID card just want to pass the raw hard drive to the OS the card is just an interface and the trouble with my adaptec card is the way it handles the hard drives... i know i cant just plug a drive in to it like i can a sata port on my main board. with out setting it up in the adaptec card as some thing... like a JBOD

 

[Mkubiak402]

if i just run 6 3tb drives off the 6 stat ports on the supermicro mainboard will i be able to just through the LSI or IBM card in at a latter date and just have them detect? and run with little effort?

 

[nightshade00013]

if i just run 6 3tb drives off the 6 stat ports on the main board will i be able to just through the LSI or IBM card in at a latter date and just have them detect? and run with little effort?

Should be pretty easy, just make sure that the cards are flashed to IT mode before trying to hook a drive up. I would recommend a backup before making changes for that just in case possibility of a problem. Worst thing I see is having to reimport the vDev but I doubt that will even be a problem.

 

[Mkubiak402]

Should be pretty easy, just make sure that the cards are flashed to IT mode before trying to hook a drive up. I would recommend a backup before making changes for that just in case possibility of a problem. Worst thing I see is having to reimport the vDev but I doubt that will even be a problem.

ok i was about to look up "flashing the cards to IT mode" and whats that is all about

 

[nightshade00013]

There is two modes the cards can be in, one is a hardware raid mode and the other is just a dumb here is the drive mode. The FreeNAS OS wants to handle all the raid functions so it wants to interface with drive as directly as possible hence the need for IT mode.

 

[Mkubiak402]

There is two modes the cards can be in, one is a hardware raid mode and the other is just a dumb here is the drive mode. The FreeNAS OS wants to handle all the raid functions so it wants to interface with drive as directly as possible hence the need for IT mode.

yeah that was my words exactly as i was going in to it "dumb.... here is the drive mode"
is this why my current Adaptec card is not a good choice..

found the info i was looking for

http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/

 

[nightshade00013]

Pretty much, JBOD is generally a raid card lumping all the drives together. It still wants to do a job and while it will work it's not a good match for ZFS. A hardware raid of drives is even worse as the file system can not check things like it can when a drive is plugged in directly without a raid controller. That is the reason why so many recommend the cards they do as you can put them into the Initiator Target (IT) mode.

That info looks good from what I can see. I used the DOS mode and I have the X8DT6-F so you will need to do the same. Can pick up FreeDOS and put it on a small flash drive then load the software needed unless you want to do it from within FreeNAS as I believe a utility is included but my GoogleFU is off today so I can not find the post. It's fairly simple, just put one card in at a time and slowly go through the steps. A word of warning though, when you start you can't just stop so have whatever computer you are using plugged into a battery backup and the kids/dogs/cats/wife etc duct taped to the wall or locked in another room. It will only take a few minutes so they shouldn't mind leaving you alone till it is done. There are a ton of tutorials out there to show how to get everything done so just read a couple and make sure that you have the same IT mode Version that FreeNAS is using for a driver for the card. Right now I believe it is Version 20 but by April that could easily change.

 

[solarisguy]

This is a repost (but it is not identical), since the forum lost some messages in the last 24 hours.

If your BIOS does not have a BIOS32 extension, you would not be able to use DOS (FreeDOS/MS-DOS/etc.) to flash from IR mode to IT mode. I did not confirm it yet, but FreeNAS includes a biosdecode utility that should be able to tell you whether your BIOS has a BIOS32 extension.

If your BIOS is a UEFI BIOS (and it should be, if it is a modern system), then you can boot into the UEFI shell and use sas2flash.efi. If your BIOS does not offer an option to boot into the UEFI shell you can place the UEFI shell on your USB memory device and boot into it (sorry, I do not have the instructions handy, you would need to search for the details by yourself).

 

[Mkubiak402]

This is a repost (but it is not identical), since the forum lost some messages in the last 24 hours.

If your BIOS does not have a BIOS32 extension, you would not be able to use DOS (FreeDOS/MS-DOS/etc.) to flash from IR mode to IT mode. I did not confirm it yet, but FreeNAS includes a biosdecode utility that should be able to tell you whether your BIOS has a BIOS32 extension.

If your BIOS is a UEFI BIOS (and it should be, if it is a modern system), then you can boot into the UEFI shell and use sas2flash.efi. If your BIOS does not offer an option to boot into the UEFI shell you can place the UEFI shell on your USB memory device and boot into it (sorry, I do not have the instructions handy, you would need to search for the details by yourself).

Ok thanks for the heads up.. I do have a few pcs UEFI and non UEFI boards i can plug the card in to reflash it