Installing on sata drive fails

[Ghydda]

Hi,

In the process of fortifying my FreeNAS setup I have purchased a pair of NOS mSATA SSDs (Sandisk sdsa5dk).
I intend to install FreeNAS onto them (mirror) and ditch the single USB-stick the rig is currently running off.

Now here it gets interesting.
Inside the installer I select the desired drives, in my case ada1 and ada2.

Notice anything od? Yep, the reported size of the drives is tiny, e.i. wrong.

Ignoring, and moving on to the next steps:
- Accepting the warning that this will erase all data yada yada yada...
- Entering root password.
- Twice.
- OK.

Aha!

FreeNAS complains. Somehow my 16Gig SSDs are not to the liking of FreeNAS.

But it gets weirder...
If I reboot into the current working FreeNAS installation, I can mount the said drives and load'em to capacity.

They check out as 16Gig-ish devices with burstrates of around the 100meg/sec mark and a sustained steady state rate of 40-50 megs/sec.


I have switched to a new-out-of-the-bag set of SATA cables, just to rule that out: yielded no change.

Has anyone any idea what is going on?
While you all scratch your heads, I will scratch mine as well - and go to bed.
Maybe it will be all better tomorrow.


Cheers!
/Ghydda

 

[Ghydda]

Forgot to mention, the current installation is reported by the CLI-login welcome message as:
FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE (FreeNAS.amd64)

And the one I tried to install was the Latest 9.10-STABLE.
Surely that is not the cause of my troubles. Surely...



Now sleep!
ZZZzzzzzzz....

/Ghydda

 

[dlavigne]

Were you able to figure this out?

 

[Mirfster]

How are you connecting the MSata drives? Are you using a particular MSata to Sata carrier?

 

[Ghydda]

No not yet - it is a low priority task (at the moment), I've got a running system, but it is in need of fortification.
The mSATA to SATA break out board I use is this eBay link.

It looks the part.
From what I can tell, it simply creates the correct power rails for mSATA and passes the signal lines straight through.

A minor correction to my second post: the console reports FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE (FreeNAS.amd64) but the WebGUI says FreeNAS 9.10.
I have no clue if this is normal behavior or not.



Cheers!
/Ghydda

 

[Mirfster]

It looks the part.
From what I can tell, it simply creates the correct power rails for mSATA and passes the signal lines straight through.

Hmm, I am not familiar with that type of carrier. Often times they may truly only support a specific set of mSata SSDs. Have you by chance checked with the vendor? Also, some of them offer "Raid" modes and that may be getting in the way.

A minor correction to my second post: the console reports FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE (FreeNAS.amd64) but the WebGUI says FreeNAS 9.10.
I have no clue if this is normal behavior or not.

Yeah 9.10 is based on FreeBSD 10.3 so that is correct.