Help! smartd is not running

[kjparenteau]

I am having difficulty with my new setup and need some guidance... For reference of what I have already been dealing with, please see my other post HERE which outlines the hardware I am running, and the goal I am trying to achieve. In short, I have a Dell PowerEdge R720xd with 12x bays in the front, 2x flex bays in the rear. Goal is all 12 bays in the front used for storage, and the 2 rear used for a mirrored FreeNAS OS installation on SSD's. Getting that done has been a challenge... But I also face a larger issue... The SMART service is unable to start...

An alert pops up in the GUI and so I go to manually try to start the service. It fails. The console does show the following message:

freenas smartd[4414]: Configuration file /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf parsed but has no entries

I am not sure where the issue lies, but I want the best performing setup and of course to have SMART running for monitoring my drives. I have the following raid cards, and maybe someone with a similar setup can provide me with some guidance...

PERC H310 Mini (Supports Non-Raid/JBOD out of the box)
I can boot to mirrored FreeNAS with this card, but I am unsure about performance with this card compared to the other two, if it will even make a difference since it's passing through to FreeNAS. The main issue right now is SMART is unable to start. The one bonus with this card running native Dell firmware is the ability to see the drives and controller within the iDRAC, and of course the ability to update the firmware easily.

PERC H710 Mini (Currently Flashed to IT Mode)
The card does not handle JBOD/pass-through at all, which would require RAID0 on each disk to their own virtual disk. I am sure there would be overhead doing this, and I have not yet tried it either. I did try flashing to IT Mode using THIS GUIDE which worked great to get the drives to pass through to FreeNAS, however the issue with this route is I was unable to boot to the mirrored FreeNAS OS. I also believe when I tested this route, SMART was also unable to start.

PCI-E LSI 9211-8i (IT Mode)
This card was used in my previous FreeNAS setup booting from USB, and had no issues at all with that config. I moved it to the R720xd, but it too had the same problems as the H710 in that it would not boot to the mirrored FreeNAS installation. The other issue if I remember correctly, was the LED status lights from the R720xd's backplane were not showing activity. I will have to re-test to make sure though. I didn't see anywhere on the backplane for LED lights to run a cable or anything, so maybe I am imagining that issue.

Bottom line... Am I overthinking this by wanting to run the OS over 2x SSD drives? I have run over USB for many years and while it has worked great for my previous FreeNAS install, I was hoping with an actual server platform as robust as the R720xd is, I could take advantage of some additional redundancy... Please advise...

Thank you,
Kevin

 

[Fredda]

Have you set up SMART tasks for your drives? (Tasks->S.M.A.R.T. Tests)

 

[kjparenteau]

Have you set up SMART tasks for your drives? (Tasks->S.M.A.R.T. Tests)

Thank you for your response Any SMART task, whether it was manual or set via schedule would not work. I am not sure why. But at this moment I am running FreeNAS via USB which isn't ideal, but it is working and SMART is functioning. It seems like when the OS is running on the IT Mode HBA that's when the SMART issues arise. So I will either get either the Dell Mirrored SD Card module for handling the FreeNAS OS, or a mirrored M.2 PCI-E card and boot from that.

Not sure just yet, but seems like my original idea failed, so I added 2 more 6TB drives for more storage to the main pool and shifted the SSD drives around a bit. 40TB over RAIDZ2, and 6TB over RAIDZ1. Not bad. :)

 

[Fredda]

Any SMART task, whether it was manual or set via schedule would not work.

This is something that would worry me. If you can't run any SMART test your basically blind for upcoming drive problems.
So not even a simple smartctl -a /dev/da0 is working?

 

[kjparenteau]

Like I said. Previously when I was trying other installation methods (mirrored ZFS over SSD) for whatever reason it was failing. Even the command you outlined would not work, and I am unsure as to why. So because of all of the issues I have adjusted my approach.

Right now I am running 100% via USB flash drive install. I am ordering one of the Dell Dual SD Card Modules which I will try to run FreeNAS OS from that for the OS redundancy piece I am seeking. But for now, I am at least working the way I need to for the time being. Thank you for your help!