HP Microserver Gen8 - M1015 HBA Controller - 12TB Drives / SSD-Cache

Marcwa19197

Dabbler
Joined
Mar 19, 2017
Messages
32
Hello,

im using FreeNas / TrueNas for years now and it works perfectly! Thanks for that.
At the moment im thinking of upgrading my setup to have more storage capacity.

My current setup:
- HP Microserver Gen8
- Raidcontroller: IBM ServeRAID M1015 8-CH SAS-SATA PCI-E - 46M0861 LSI SAS9220-8i (Flashed to IT-Mode)
- CPU: E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz
- RAM: 16 GB ECC
- HDD: 4x 4TB WD Red
- Systemdrive: 1x 1TB 2.5" HDD

I want to upgrade to 4x 12TB WD Red drives.
Did someone have an identical setup? Does someone know if the RAID-Controller can handle 12TB Drives? (i did not found an valid answer)
Also im thinking if i should install TrueNAS to an SD-Card and use an Samsung SSD for caching, does this speed up things? Im not able to add more Memory, because 16GB is the limit for my Board.

Thank you for any information!
 

blanchet

Guru
Joined
Apr 17, 2018
Messages
515
I have also an HP Microserver Gen8
  • I boot from a SSD SATA disk, located in the cdrom slot and connected to the internal USB connector of the motherboard with a Sabrent USB3-to-SATA adapter.
  • I do not use an external HBA. The internal HP B120i works perfectly with TrueNAS if you configure it for AHCI mode in the BIOS. Despite its HP name, this chip is a regular Intel SATA controller. So you can use the PCIe slot for something else.
  • I have 10TB SATA Seagate hard disks. I think that any SATA disk should work in HP Microserver Gen8. Disk size limitations happen only in RAID mode, on the other hand there are not disk size limits in AHCI mode.
  • Using a SSD for SLOG is useless except if you need synchronous writes (bascally only VMware ESXi datastores need them)
 

Marcwa19197

Dabbler
Joined
Mar 19, 2017
Messages
32
I have also an HP Microserver Gen8
  • I boot from a SSD SATA disk, located in the cdrom slot and connected to the internal USB connector of the motherboard with a Sabrent USB3-to-SATA adapter.
  • I do not use an external HBA. The internal HP B120i works perfectly with TrueNAS if you configure it for AHCI mode in the BIOS. Despite its HP name, this chip is a regular Intel SATA controller. So you can use the PCIe slot for something else.
  • I have 10TB SATA Seagate hard disks. I think that any SATA disk should work in HP Microserver Gen8. Disk size limitations happen only in RAID mode, on the other hand there are not disk size limits in AHCI mode.
  • Using a SSD for SLOG is useless except if you need synchronous writes (bascally only VMware ESXi datastores need them)
Thank you for the information. Does the internal SATA Controller allow Hot-Plug of Drives? I Think there was an reason for me not using the internal Controller, but this was some long time ago.
So its not necessary to have an SSD for SLOG as long as i only use a few SMB / NFS Shares and no VMware Datastore on the NAS?
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
The LSI 6Gbps HBA's have no issues with SATA drives of any existing size, though there have been some reports that they may not work with first-generation SATA disks (most of which are long dead).

Code:
mps0: <Avago Technologies (LSI) SAS2008> port 0x4000-0x40ff mem 0xf75f0000-0xf75fffff,0xf7580000-0xf75bffff irq 18 at device 0.0 on pci3
mps0: Firmware: 20.00.07.00, Driver: 21.02.00.00-fbsd
mps0: IOCCapabilities: 1285c<ScsiTaskFull,DiagTrace,SnapBuf,EEDP,TransRetry,EventReplay,HostDisc>
da1 at mps0 bus 0 scbus3 target 6 lun 0
da1: <ATA WDC WD120EMAZ-11 0A81> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da1: Serial Number xxxx
da1: 600.000MB/s transfers
da1: Command Queueing enabled
da1: 11444224MB (23437770752 512 byte sectors)
da2 at mps0 bus 0 scbus3 target 7 lun 0
da2: <ATA WDC WD120EMAZ-11 0A81> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
da2: Serial Number xxxx
da2: 600.000MB/s transfers
da2: Command Queueing enabled
da2: 11444224MB (23437770752 512 byte sectors)
etc...


is heavily beat-upon in one of the NAS units here, so clearly 12TB works fine. As does 14TB.
 

blanchet

Guru
Joined
Apr 17, 2018
Messages
515
Does the internal SATA Controller allow Hot-Plug of Drives? I Think there was an reason for me not using the internal Controller, but this was some long time ago.

The internal SATA controller does not support hot-plug drives. In this case you have to use a LSI HBA like you already do (but he occupies the only free PCIe slot that can be used for something else like a NVMe SSD)

So its not necessary to have an SSD for SLOG as long as i only use a few SMB / NFS Shares and no VMware Datastore on the NAS?
If you have only SMB and NFS shares and do not use VMware, then a SSD SLOG is pointless.
 
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