dustmaster
Dabbler
- Joined
- Nov 24, 2020
- Messages
- 10
Hi to all!
For a fresh Proxmox on ZFS machine I was planning to purchase a refurbished HP DL380 Gen10 with integrated S100i controller, 8x SAS/SATA backplane and NVME PCIe riser to 8x NVME/U.2 cage.
When I started research about an HBA that fits this setup I quickly realised that the S100i, as well as the standard HPE controllers like the P408 or E208 are not supposed to be a good choice. For ex. see this post: the hybrid mode was not a "real" passthrough and in any case the drivers were way less approved reliable by experience and the community.
I got a bit desperate as the generic HP choices seemed to confine to the HPE H200 and H220 (8x, PCIe 3.0, 6G) in IT mode, sporting LSI chips (unlike the H240). But no 12G and no idea about my NVME/U.2 drives.
Installing an LSI PCIe card like the LSI SAS 9305-16i or a LSI SAS 9300-8i would be the second option but nobody really wanted to approve it directly. Found many threads about HP being picky about third-party hardware, jet engine fans in cases of unrecognized hardware, etc.
So I even thought about going Dell as from my research those PERCs seemed to be the better-liked devices - not to mention Dell also being the more favoured brand for homelab servers as they are less prone to license pains and compatibility issues.
In the end I returned to reddit`s zfs community where a rather reliable source dismissed all the HP bashing, even reactivating my original dream: Just use a P408 in hybrid mode - you could do a system Volume in hardware RAID1, let the other drives go HBA and create your ZFS. He posted some original drive infos he got from the HPE SmartArray E208i-p, so everything kinda trustworthy.
What do you make out of this? There seems to be a controversy on the horizon.
I'd want so much more to follow the positive stance as I can't believe it should be that tricky to get a decent Proxmox Install with ZFS on rather current HP hardware .. also those refurbed HPs seem to be quite a bit cheaper than Dells.
For a fresh Proxmox on ZFS machine I was planning to purchase a refurbished HP DL380 Gen10 with integrated S100i controller, 8x SAS/SATA backplane and NVME PCIe riser to 8x NVME/U.2 cage.
When I started research about an HBA that fits this setup I quickly realised that the S100i, as well as the standard HPE controllers like the P408 or E208 are not supposed to be a good choice. For ex. see this post: the hybrid mode was not a "real" passthrough and in any case the drivers were way less approved reliable by experience and the community.
I got a bit desperate as the generic HP choices seemed to confine to the HPE H200 and H220 (8x, PCIe 3.0, 6G) in IT mode, sporting LSI chips (unlike the H240). But no 12G and no idea about my NVME/U.2 drives.
Installing an LSI PCIe card like the LSI SAS 9305-16i or a LSI SAS 9300-8i would be the second option but nobody really wanted to approve it directly. Found many threads about HP being picky about third-party hardware, jet engine fans in cases of unrecognized hardware, etc.
So I even thought about going Dell as from my research those PERCs seemed to be the better-liked devices - not to mention Dell also being the more favoured brand for homelab servers as they are less prone to license pains and compatibility issues.
In the end I returned to reddit`s zfs community where a rather reliable source dismissed all the HP bashing, even reactivating my original dream: Just use a P408 in hybrid mode - you could do a system Volume in hardware RAID1, let the other drives go HBA and create your ZFS. He posted some original drive infos he got from the HPE SmartArray E208i-p, so everything kinda trustworthy.
What do you make out of this? There seems to be a controversy on the horizon.
I'd want so much more to follow the positive stance as I can't believe it should be that tricky to get a decent Proxmox Install with ZFS on rather current HP hardware .. also those refurbed HPs seem to be quite a bit cheaper than Dells.