Highpoint 2720SGL does not see all drives

[greenwas]

Hello All,

Just trying to get into FreeNAS for the first time and am pretty illiterate with the FreeBSD aspect of things. I am having a problem with FreeNAS seeing all 4 drives that I am trying to setup in a RAID 10 on a Highpoint 2720SGL card. The drives that are being utilized are 600GB 15k SAS drives. The 2720's BIOs will see all 4 drives, they can be placed into an array or JBOD without issue. FreeNAS will see 3/4 of the drives without issue (same disks fails to be recognized every time). I have attempted utilizing different cables/backplanes with no change in status. Is there something I can do to manually initialize the disk? What log files can give me some hints about what might be failing? Do you feel that this is likely an issue with FreeNAS or just a DOA disk?

 

[jgreco]

Suggest seeing if any of this is relevant.

 

[greenwas]

So I'm not sure what to make of this. I thought I did not need to do anything because the 2720SGL was natively supported in FreeNAS-8.3.1-RELEASE-p2-x64. None of the smartctl commands appear to run on my systems. Do I need to flash my card to the non-RAID FW to work properly?

 

[William Grzybowski]

You might want to give 9.1 ALPHA a try, might be a driver issue.

Is it always the same disk even if you switch ports?

 

[greenwas]

Yes it is the same disk. I'm just not sure if the drive is shot. I haven't fired up an array and tried booting another OS to it or anything as of yet.

Edit: No change in status with 9.1 alpha.

 

[cyberjock]

My personal experience with Highpoint controllers are that they are good for Windows only, garbage for FreeBSD/FreeNAS. I haven't used a 2720SGL(unless you want to send me a spare 2720SGL you have :D ) but I'd be hesitant to even try to build a FreeNAS server with a Highpoint. That long thread where I explain all the different families of Highpoint cards is because I used them for like 9 years in home servers for myself and friends. Now that I'm into FreeNAS I'm finding that Highpoint doesn't have the wide OS support they claim on their website. They're now a "buyer beware" in my book. :(

Generally, if it doesn't "just work" its probably not supported. I thought someone had said they had a Highpoint SGL card that didn't work because it was a different hardware version that wasn't compatible with the FreeBSD drivers but I couldn't find it.

 

[Drk]

Green, move the cables around from drive to drive that is what I did when I had that problem. Other thing I got was for some reason it only shows one card In disk manager. The other card it tries to use mutlipath not sure why. It is not the card cause i can move shit around and same thing on other card i am out of ideas. I will never use high point again pain in my ass.

Rodney

 

[Drk]

Ps I can give ssh if someone cares to look.

 

[greenwas]

Thanks for all of the responses. I have attempted to use all 4 cables/backplanes and the other port with no change in status. It also doesn't show up when it is the only disk connected. Just to confirm full functionality I setup a RAID 10 in the bios, installed windows 8, and then transferred about 100GB to it without any issues. Should I give flashing the bios to a non-raid firmware a shot or will I just be beating a dead horse? I have got no idea what could possibly be going on that is preventing this one friggen drive from being recognized. As an aside - windows 8 took no more than 5 minutes to install which was really cool - I also thoroughly enjoyed transferring that 100GB at ~750Mbps.

 

[Drk]

I have mine flashed in non raid mode. I could never get freenas to see the drives in raid mode even though you should just use it as hba card.

 

[greenwas]

OK. Maybe I will dick around with this at some point in time. Is the IBM M1015 still a valid option? Given the aggravation I am experiencing I think I'd rather just drop $100 on something I know will work with a little tinkering.

Edit: Decided to use the search feature. I feel as though I was chomping at the bit to get this build off the ground and didn't do the proper homework. I am now rethinking everything that I have spec'd previously and may take most of the hardware and turn it into a low-end gaming rig and/or a second virtual host to play with Hyper-V Clustering, etc.

 

[jgreco]

OK. Maybe I will dick around with this at some point in time. Is the IBM M1015 still a valid option? Given the aggravation I am experiencing I think I'd rather just drop $100 on something I know will work with a little tinkering.

Edit: Decided to use the search feature. I feel as though I was chomping at the bit to get this build off the ground and didn't do the proper homework. I am now rethinking everything that I have spec'd previously and may take most of the hardware and turn it into a low-end gaming rig and/or a second virtual host to play with Hyper-V Clustering, etc.

There are two minor drawbacks that I can think of to the M1015,

1) You have to crossflash it, and the tools sometimes don't work with some boards.

2) It eats roughly 10 watts.

For best luck, if you decide to do different hardware, there are some good recommendations for socket 1155 over in the Hardware Forum in a sticky.

 

[greenwas]

JGreco - Do you have any other suggestions on solid cards that meet a similar price point?

 

[jgreco]

The problem in the PC world is that there are a lot of vendors making a lot of cards, most of which are designed to squeeze maximum profit out of the cheapest possible components. The reason the M1015 is liked by this community is because it is a server-grade card; LSI makes the cards and sells them to IBM, and IBM warrants them when installed in an IBM server, so if one fails, IBM has to dispatch a tech to replace the card, and this is a relatively expensive event for IBM. If it's incompatible with something a customer adds, this can also generate a service call. So IBM manufactures their hardware to a more exacting and precise standard, and/or requires their suppliers to do so, which means that some fairly significant engineering effort gets put into their cards.

Now the M1015 is really intended to be an "entry-level" RAID card, and when you bludgeon out the RAIDware, that leaves the CPU still physically present on the card, running. So some watts burned.

And the OEM firmware bludgeoning process is not officially LSI-blessed; they'd rather sell you their LSI-branded retail HBA product for about $300, which comes with LSI support.

So, there are probably other options, but the IT firmware on the LSI happens to have a high degree of FreeNAS compatibility, and the M1015 is probably the cheapest way to get there.

 

[Drk]

Green try the 9.1 with the new 9.x driver from hpt that worked for me in raid mode even. I am doing some testing now with it.

 

[greenwas]

Hello All,

Sorry for the delayed response. So I went ahead and purchased the M1015, Flashed it, and fired up all of my drives. I believe I may have found a potential causation of the one drive missing; failing SMART tests. One of the 4 drives that I have is reporting back with data error rate too high. I am not sure if this was the exact reason for the missing drive or the HighPoint card.

 

[jgreco]

This is one of the reasons that most of us here on the forums would not recommend a RAID card and push for HBA cards instead. Some of the intelligent "hardware RAID" cards go stupid in various ways with failing drives when in JBOD mode, and may not even bother with letting you know. With an HBA card, you get to chat with the drive via SMART if you want.

 

[Horace Gilchrist]

My personal experience with Highpoint controllers are that they are good for Windows only, garbage for FreeBSD/FreeNAS. I haven't used a 2720SGL(unless you want to send me a spare 2720SGL you have :D ) but I'd be hesitant to even try to build a FreeNAS server with a Highpoint. That long thread where I explain all the different families of Highpoint cards is because I used them for like 9 years in home servers for myself and friends. Now that I'm into FreeNAS I'm finding that Highpoint doesn't have the wide OS support they claim on their website. They're now a "buyer beware" in my book. :(

Generally, if it doesn't "just work" its probably not supported. I thought someone had said they had a Highpoint SGL card that didn't work because it was a different hardware version that wasn't compatible with the FreeBSD drivers but I couldn't find it.

Please PM me. I am willing to "loan" you a Highpoint 2720SGL adapter to tinker with and get a definitive answer on FreeNAS support for this device. Let me know how'd you like to proceed. I'll pay for shipping to you and back to me.

Hope this helps!

 

[jgreco]

There's been discussion of this card in the past.

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/high-point-2720sgl.166/

Probably wouldn't hurt to go review the lessons learned in that thread.