[info] Supertrak EX 8650 won't work with FreeNAS

[Pseudobolt]

I've tagged this info since I'm not looking for help getting the card working -- I'm just going to go buy a M1015 as recommended in the stickies. I am posting this just for future reference in case anyone gets / is considering getting one of these. Short version: the driver either doesn't exist for FreeBSD, or it's not recognising the device and not loading the driver. (See here for another thread from 6 months ago where someone couldn't get a supertrak EX8350 working, either.)

Longer version: It sees the hardware, but doesn't have / load a driver for it.

Code:

pci3: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib3
pci3: <mass storage, RAID> at device 0.0 (no driver attached)

Looking at the other thread, there might be a way to get a driver put in for it, but I don't think it's worth the bother. I've played with the controller under Linux, and although it works fine, it will not pass-through drives -- you must configure them as a virtual disk before they show up (even if it's just 1 physical <-> 1 virtual drive mapping). On top of this, I can't get smartctl to report anything meaningful from the drives, either. So my recommendation: don't use this controller for FreeNAS.

 

[Pseudobolt]

So, to give a practical example of exactly WHY you shouldn't use controllers like this with FreeNAS...

I pulled the drives which were attached to this controller and connected them to basic motherboard SATA ports to run some SMART tests and diagnostics on them. And what do I find, but that three (out of eight) have several hundred reallocated sectors - which rapidly increased when I started to read-scan the drives (up to two thousand on one of them, before it crapped out - I think it ran out of spare sectors). But hey, it hadn't actually reached the SMART threshold yet, right? So as far as the RAID controller is concerned, all of the drives are "OK"! Let's not bother to warn the user that the drive is in the process of dying... it might just be a little under the weather, right?

THIS is why you all should use a straight pass-through controller and set up SMART monitoring. And email alerts. So FreeNAS can send you mail telling you that the fail / remapped sector count is rapidly increasing, and that you should replace the drives with new ones NOW.

(I fortunately haven't actually used these drives for anything yet... turns out it was a good idea to thoroughly test them before I trust them with my data!)

 

[cyberjock]

You are one lucky SOB. Things could have been *much* worse!