HP Microserver Gen8 - Need advice for BIOS configuration

[Subsonic]

Hi folks,

i´m not completly new to freenas/truenas, but now i want to move my main file storage to a truenas core installation using a HP Microserver Gen8. I already tested the hardware with 2 x 1 TB WD-drives every now and then since a year or so, and it worked really good. As i had some old NTFS formatted disks lying around, i isntalled Windows Server 2022 on the Microserver Gen8 to copy those files to a new external drive, which i would later copy to the truenas installation. This installation wasn´t as straight forward as the truenas installation about one year ago. I wanted to install to a SSD and the drive installed in slot 1 wasn´t showing up in the drive menu from windows. I tried to install the driver for the built-in B120i raid controller which worked fine, but the drive still wasn´t showing. I looked into the raid controller application (HP-ACU) and saw that i had to make a raid array even when using only a single drive. So now i looked into the BIOS and saw that i can disable the raid controller as a whole and use it as a HBA with standard AHCI mode. After switching to AHCI and disabling the controller my SSD-drive showed up in the windows installation.

My questions is now: What would be the best practice for my later truenas installation? As i know ZFS wants direct communication with the drives, so using a RAID-controller in front of it isn´t the prefered method. But with the BIOS default settings where the RAID-controller is active, but no raid array configured, the drives show up as separated drives in the truenas installation?! Thats really weird. Anybody got an answer for this? Is there a way to controll inside truenas over cli or something if the controller is acting like an HBA or a RAID-controller?

Thanks for your help!

Greets George

PS: Here are screenshots from the bespoken BIOS-settings:

 

[Samuel Tai]

The MicroServer uses Intel software RAID; it's not a true RAID controller. If you configure it for AHCI mode, that would configure it like an HBA.

 

[Subsonic]

The MicroServer uses Intel software RAID; it's not a true RAID controller. If you configure it for AHCI mode, that would configure it like an HBA.

Thanks for your reply, i wasn´t aware of that. But i still don´t understand why my drives are showing up as single drives, even with the active raid-controller in truenas, but not in windows server. How does truenas handle this other then windows?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Thanks for your reply, i wasn´t aware of that. But i still don´t understand why my drives are showing up as single drives, even with the active raid-controller in truenas, but not in windows server. How does truenas handle this other then windows?

Because Windows has an Intel software RAID driver that combines all the disks into a single volume. TrueNAS lacks this driver, so it sees the raw disks.

 

[Subsonic]

Because Windows has an Intel software RAID driver that combines all the disks into a single volume. TrueNAS lacks this driver, so it sees the raw disks.

I understand. Thanks for your help!