Install Adaptec 6805 drivers

[zpliptzy]

So, I decided I wanted to upgrade my NAS-I'm coming from FreeNAS 8, and it's worked like a champ so far. Upgraded to the following hardware:

ASRock C2550D4I motherboard/cpu
2x8GB Kingston DDR3, from the recommended list for that board
6x3tb Seagate ST3000DM001 -approved drives for the 6805
Adaptec 6805 raid card

I got FreeNAS 9.2 installed just fine, except when I boot it up and get to the web interface to add the disks, nothing shows up (I might add, that previous to trying to get FreeNAS on here, I installed Windows 7 on a spare SSD I had laying around, to do some benchmarks on the array, so yes, the array is setup and functional). I did some further reading, and it appears that the Adaptec card is not natively supported by FreeNAS. That's fine I guess, I'm always up for a challenge. I download the most recent drivers for the card from the Adaptec site...and that's about where I've gotten to. Here's what I've tried to load the drivers:
1: Edit the ISO for FreeNAS, by injecting the drivers into the /boot/module folder, and add a /boot/loader.conf.local containing :

CODE: SELECT ALL
# Loading Adaptec Raid ASR 6805 card
aacu64_load="YES"

I got this from this thread: http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...-load-adaptec-raid-drivers.17520/#post-104939

This basically doesnt install at all-it pauses before it gets to the actual install-just sits there indefinitely.

2: Load the drivers onto 3 different flash drives formatted in fat32 and try to copy them to the FreeNAS box, then tried the same with ntfs, and all the FreeNAS machine does is spit out 5-6 different messages about how it hates my flash drives. I also tried to format the drives from within the FreeNAS machine, and it spits out errors about how the drives dont exist. I've tried mounting them, and I get similar errors about how they dont exist.

I was referencing this thread as a guide for this part:
http://blog.hani-ibrahim.de/en/netzwerktreiber-auf-freenas-installieren.html
He was installing a network driver, but I figured the same principles could be adapted to my raid card.

3: Setup a FreeBSD 9.2 virtual machine within VirtualBox, and tried to copy the drivers onto the flash drive with FreeNAS installed on it. This was just a frustrating mess...very similar errors to what I was getting from above, where the drives dont exist.

I'm probably just forgetting something basic and stupid, but hey...I've done everything I can think of. I'm not too fluent in FreeBSD, but I'm pretty good at googling how to do something :) All my computers, with exception to my FreeNAS box, are Windows 7.

So, oh wise forums...where have I gone wrong? What needs to happen to get my card going?

 

[joeschmuck]

You could ask @Bender555 for assistance as it looks like Bender got it working.

 

[praecorloth]

I can't help with the driver portion of this, but did I read correctly that you've set up a RAID using the Adaptec controller? Are you wanting to use this RAID with FreeNAS? I ask because part of the primary function of FreeNAS is to manage RAIDs. ZFS specifically loses many of it's advantages when run on top of another controller's RAID. And if I understand correctly, aside from losing advantages, running ZFS on top of another controller's RAID introduces danger to your data, as ZFS can no longer guarantee writes to the disk have taken place.

If I have misunderstood the situation, my apologies. I just want to make sure people are getting the most out of their FreeNAS box.

 

[zpliptzy]

I can't help with the driver portion of this, but did I read correctly that you've set up a RAID using the Adaptec controller? Are you wanting to use this RAID with FreeNAS? I ask because part of the primary function of FreeNAS is to manage RAIDs. ZFS specifically loses many of it's advantages when run on top of another controller's RAID. And if I understand correctly, aside from losing advantages, running ZFS on top of another controller's RAID introduces danger to your data, as ZFS can no longer guarantee writes to the disk have taken place.

If I have misunderstood the situation, my apologies. I just want to make sure people are getting the most out of their FreeNAS box.

You pretty much understood it. In my previous box, I used FreeNAS to manage my raid, a raid z1. I decided I wanted to offload some of the load of managing the data this time around, to hopefully allow decent transfer speeds for offsite streaming of data-previously the main factor keeping me from doing so was the slow streaming speeds. Since this has a significantly higher read/write with the same redundancy (I setup raid 5 on the new array), I'm pretty sure I should be able to do offsite streaming. I'm mainly using FreeNAS in this instance as an operating system, and not so much for the security it offers.

 

[cyberjock]

No no no.

Doing ahrdware RAID with ZFS will kill performance(not to mention all of the other things that go wrong). What you think you are doing isn't what you are going to get. The only advantage that hardware RAID + ZFS has is you will lose performance and reliability. So no, stop what you are doing and go back to the drawing board. ;)