HP ML110 Gen9 / G9

[Matute]

Hi all, I'm fairly new to FreeNAS, but everything tested so far has really impressed me.
I need to build 2 boxes, a main NAS and a secondary one mostly to replicate the first one (backup) and also to backup some VMWare VMs. I've been reading a lot (thanks Cyberjock for your excelent guide) and think that by now I have an understanding of the general architecture and the way things work. Secondary box (called FN2) is a 6 years old IBM x3200 with a flashed M1015 and 7x3TB (6 in RZ2 and a spare) WD Red with 8GB ECC memory and a DC S3500 SSD as a SLOG (I really need it because of the way VMWare handles the copies of the VMs and it has improved by a factor of 10x the write speed in my case) now I need to build the main box (which will be of course FN1) and it should be a really redundant and quick in the reading area solution. For this I'm planning on building it on a HP ML110 G9 with 16 GB and 2 zdevs of 3x3TB WD Red each in R1 mode plus a spare drive. This should give me 2x write speed, 3x read speed and a lot of redundancy. Of course I'm also planning on using a SLOG (again a S3500) if need arise I'll expand the RAM as I know 16 GB is not much.

Now the questions:
- Is it necessary or convenient to use a M1015 flashed card or can I use the onboard HBA? (I understand from what I read that apart from the raid card this mother can be used as a real HBA, has anyone experience with it?)
- Does the ML110 G9 perform well in other aspects with FreeBSD in general and FreeNAS in paticular? (i've read about a network card driver issue but that was back in 2015, I assume everything has been taken care of)

Thanks a lot in advance and sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere, but I didn't find anything at all regarding ML110.

FreeNAS-9.10.2-U3 (e1497f269)
the server datasheet can be found here

 

[Matute]

After 5 more hours of research I'm still not able to find what lies under the B140i controller, of course I'm not willing to use it as a RAID controller but rather as an HBA that let's FreeNAS query the disks, use SMART, etc. This server comes with 2x4 SATA ports + 2x1 SATA which is great for my setup, but I'm not sure how well does it perform in "HBA mode". Hope this clarifies a bit my prior post.

 

[Matute]

For others that may have the same doubt, I finally installed the 6 mentioned disks (WD 3TB Red) and a SLOG (Intel S3500) on the mentioned server, I had to custom build a cable because the power source didn't have SATA power terminals (other than the 4 that come with the 4 non hot swap bays) I connected all of them to the 2 SFF-8087 SATA ports in the motherboard and set it in the BIOS to behave as a HBA.

As far as I can see (using dmesg) the SATA controller shows as:

ahci1: <Intel Wellsburg AHCI SATA controller>​

SMART data is available to FreeNAS:

[root@freenas1] /mnt/FN1/dc-rs# smartctl -l selftest /dev/ada0
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [FreeBSD 10.3-STABLE amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 179 -
​

And it has been running fine for two weeks. Any thoughts before I put this box in production are really welcomed.