Installing FreeNAS onto PCIe SSD on a 2012 MacPro?? Is this possible?

[TimRedBeard]

Hi all, new to the forum and new to FreeNAS now I've spent all weekend digging around the interwebs trying to find instructions on how to install FreeNAS on a MacPro or Mac in general. I ran across some information that said if I can install FreeNAS to a boot drive and not run it or try to install it off the USB Stick that the MacPro should be able to run it. I'm asking here first if anyone has successfully performed this. Right now I have a 3.2GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor 16GB of ECC RAM, 6 - 1TB WD Black HDD's and a 120GB SSD in the 16X PCIe slot on the MacPro.

My thoughts were to install FreeNAS on the PCIe Drive and use the rest of the drives as my storage. Based on some of the things I've read it seems people have got this to work. However what I'm questioning is should I install the ISO onto the PCIe Drive using Rufus? Should I install FreeNAS on the Drive using a Windows Machine and they put it in the Mac. I would like to get it to run on the Mac because I have a bunch of these towers at work and I can put them in a couple different areas for people that need storage, the problem is I don't have any Windows towers that can hold as many hard drives.

Any help is appreciated and welcomed. Thank you all that take the time to read and reply.
TimRedBeard

 

[HoneyBadger]

Welcome Tim.

The downloadable ISO is just the installer - you'll want to put it onto a USB stick or burn it to DVD, boot from it, and then perform the actual install to your SSD.

I'm assuming that you've rigged the extra two drives up in the Mac Pro optical bays via some manner of bracket, so the internal DVD drive isn't available for boot. If so, you'll want to either boot from USB or a USB-DVD drive. Make sure you select "UEFI boot environment" during the installer as the MacPro has no BIOS.

Depending on what type of SSD that is, it might be better used as a cache device if the workload demands - but it will certainly function as a reliable boot drive. You only really need about 16GB to hold FreeNAS itself.

What kind of workload are you planning? Just general file storage? Assuming all drives in a RAIDZ2, each will give you slightly less than 4TB of usable space - but in several "islands" all over your office. I'm not saying it won't work, but it certainly isn't the solution I'd architect myself unless budget was extremely tight. (And if it is, you might be better served by selling a few of those Mac Pro's to foot the bill for a real storage system!)

 

[TimRedBeard]

HoneyBadger Hello! Thanks for the welcome.

I did the majority of what you said for the installation on the drive I was going to boot from. I did install via UEFI boot environment when installing from the USB Installer to the Drive, it complete fine and I was able to get to the boot screen when I put it into the Mac, however I selected normal boot and alas am getting the same error message I had before. I actually was able to find in our storage area a rack mount system that ran our old telecomm system here, the hardware is not old by any means and I believe the board has support for ECC memory. Not to mention it has headers for at least 6-8 drives on it. Looks like this might be my best option vs. trying to spend time getting FreeNAS running on the MacPro and yes we should get rid of some of these old MacPro at least the ones that don't have dual chipsets.

Thanks again for the response.
TRB

 

[kdragon75]

You will likely need rEFIned to boot into FreeNAS as the system will not natively automatically boot to a non Apple OS

 

[kdragon75]

I actually was able to find in our storage area a rack mount system

Does it have a RAID card? If so it NEEDS to be replaced unless you don't mind losing your clients data ;)

 

[TimRedBeard]

Does it have a RAID card? If so it NEEDS to be replaced unless you don't mind losing your clients data ;)

No RAID Card in this system...but it's a bit of an old Chipset. It's got a Pentium E5700 Dual-Core 3.0GHz in the LGA775 Chipset, MoBo does not support ECC Ram. This is what I would be using instead of the MacPro.

Gigabyte GA-P45T-ES3G
Pentium E5700 3.0GHz Dual-Core Chip
16GB of DDR3 RAM
6 - 1TB WD Black 7200RPM HDD
1 - PCIe SSD for the Boot Drive

Will that work for FreeNAS?

 

[kdragon75]

Yeah... that's OLD. You should definitely do a full load test for a day or two just to test everything. Including a memtest. Man! check out those PCI slots! :D

 

[TimRedBeard]

Yeah... that's OLD. You should definitely do a full load test for a day or two just to test everything. Including a memtest. Man! check out those PCI slots! :D

Do you think if I installed rEFInd on the MacPro that it would boot from the PCIe SSD I have in there? I installed FreeNAS using a Windows computer booting from the USB and selecting the SSD as the install drive which was hooked up using a sled.

Let me know your thoughts.
Tim

 

[HoneyBadger]

however I selected normal boot and alas am getting the same error message I had before

What error message is that? I don't see it posted/linked.

Regarding that second system, it has no ECC support so I'd give it a pass personally - the whole point of ZFS is to protect your data, and if it can't do that properly without ECC ... well, why are you using ZFS? ;)

 

[kdragon75]

Do you think if I installed rEFInd on the MacPro that it would boot from the PCIe SSD I have in there? I installed FreeNAS using a Windows computer booting from the USB and selecting the SSD as the install drive which was hooked up using a sled.

Let me know your thoughts.
Tim

From previous research the Mac pro can be picky about booting from PCIe. If you card is compatible, yes it should boot fine, though as other have suggested, a sata SSD would be preferred to boot from the the PCIe SSD would better serve as cache/SLOG depending on shares used.

 

[TimRedBeard]

From previous research the Mac pro can be picky about booting from PCIe. If you card is compatible, yes it should boot fine; though as other have suggested, a sata SSD would be preferred to boot from the the PCIe SSD would better serve as cache/SLOG depending on shares used.

What error message is that? I don't see it posted/linked.

I will clarify, I have a PCIe Card that had a 2.5" SSD installed on the card, I can take the 2.5" SSD off the card and put it in a tray and that's how I installed FreeNAS, when I boot in OSX holding the Option Key it's see the PCIe Card with the SSD on it and it says EFI Boot, when I boot I get the GRUB menu, I select FreeBSD and then I select Normal Boot and then I get this error message:

KDB: debugger backends: ddb
KDB: current backend: ddb
ACPI BIOS Error (bug): A valid RSDP was not found (20170728/tbxfroot-369)
panic: running without device atpic requires a local APIC
cpuid = 0
KDB: stack backtrace:
db_trace_self_wrapper() at db_trace_self_wrapper+0x2b/frame 0xFFFFFFFF82735b90
vpanic() at vpanic+0x186/frame 0xFFFFFFFF82735c10
panic() at panic+0x43/frame 0xFFFFFFFF82735c70
apic_init() at apic_init+0x112/frame 0xFFFFFFFF82735c90
mi_startup() at mi_startup+0x9c/frame 0xFFFFFFFF82735cb0
btext() at btext+0x2c
KDB: enter: panic
[ thred pid 0 tid 0 ]
Stopped at kdb_enter+0x3b: movq $0,kdb_why
db>

Any thoughts?

 

[Chris Moore]

a Pentium E5700 Dual-Core 3.0GHz in the LGA775 Chipset, MoBo does not support ECC Ram

Really, that is old enough that you should not use it. it will perform poorly.

 

[TimRedBeard]

Really, that is old enough that you should not use it. it will perform poorly.

Chris, I'm not planning on using this now, I'm back to trying to get the 2012 MacPro5,1 to work with FreeNAS installed on a SSD mounted to a PCIe card. The fact that the Mobo doesn't support EEC on that Gigabyte and that it's so old has push me back to the Mac solution.

Thanks for the info though...I appreciate the help from everyone thus far.

TRB

 

[Chris Moore]

What kind of budget do you have to work with and what is the total amount of storage you need? Your best solution is having a single server and a backup server instead of having a quantity of smaller servers.

 

[TimRedBeard]

What kind of budget do you have to work with and what is the total amount of storage you need? Your best solution is having a single server and a backup server instead of having a quantity of smaller servers.

I work in the newspaper industry, what's a budget? :) Right now I'm trying to make use of the hardware I have onsite I have plenty of MacPro's which can hold multiple Hard Drives and have ECC Memory that's why I thought to use these. The best I can hope for is if I can get it working on the MacPro they will be larger Hard Drives but there is no way I can get any capital to buy a setup. And our server team doesn't have the storage space available to give us what our team need so I have to improvise.

 

[Chris Moore]

I work in the newspaper industry, what's a budget? ... ... And our server team doesn't have the storage space available to give us what our team need so I have to improvise.

I get it. You have to make do with what you have.

 

[TimRedBeard]

You will likely need rEFIned to boot into FreeNAS as the system will not natively automatically boot to a non Apple OS

Will this require me to have macOS installed on one of the disks?

 

[kdragon75]

Will this require me to have macOS installed on one of the disks?

No not at all. Its an EFI boot manager. technically not even a boot loader.

 

[TimRedBeard]

No not at all. Its an EFI boot manager. technically not even a boot loader.

I'm in the process of installing it now and I will report back with more. I think if I can get this to work I'm going to put a step by step guide together for this because I can't be the only one that wants to do this with an older MacPro tower...or maybe I am..

 

[HoneyBadger]

Will this require me to have macOS installed on one of the disks?

Here's the page on installing rEFInd:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html

Since I doubt the 2012 MacPro is EFIv2, you'll need some manner of a running OS on it in order to do the install - but that could probably be a liveCD of Linux with UEFI support.

Also, I totally get working in a small budget. Just make sure that while IT knows they aren't expected to support your stuff, they should ideally be informed so they don't go "hey, what's this MacPro doing, better unplug it!"