Installing on Sun Fire x4500

[Ytsejamer1]

Hi everyone!

I've been digging around for a bit and I'd like to keep using an older Sun Fire x4500 "Thumper" box. It has about 24TB of storage between 48, 500GB SATA disks on four, 8-port Marvel 88sx6081 SATA controllers. I've been running Oracle Solaris 11 on it with ZFS however we unfortunately turned on deduplication and ended up falling into the performance black hole. Nothing is worth saving on it, so I whacked the big 20TB zpool. The boot pool was a mirrored zpool. I removed one of the two disks from it hoping that it would become visible to the installer.

I tried getting into the controller, but it seems CTRL+A or CTRL+M doesn't work.

Unfortunately it seems that I can't get the FreeNAS install to even see the disks. I did see that the Marvell 88SE6081SATA controller(s) are supported via an Adaptec driver. I'm hoping this can somehow work. Has anyone had an experience getting FreeNAS installed onto a similar thumper box?

 

[cyberjock]

As a general rule, if your controller doesn't "just work" with FreeNAS its not supported. :(

 

[Ytsejamer1]

As a general rule, if your controller doesn't "just work" with FreeNAS its not supported. :(

First off...thanks for the reply back. Rats...I was hoping for some glimmer of hope. I fiddled around with FreeNAS on my nested virtual environment on my workstation a little while back and I really enjoyed it.. It was pretty slick to configure and use. Now that I've got a low priority storage server that almost seems made for FreeNAS, it figures something is amiss. I'm just so dead set against throwing away a box with 24TB.

 

[cyberjock]

What you can try is installing FreeBSD 9(since the next version of FreeNAS will be based on FreeBSD 9). If it does work then you can put in a ticket at support.freenas.org to have the driver added. If you provide the source code to implement it you can be virtually guaranteed that it will make it into the next patch. If you aren't a coder or don't have the source code it may make it. It just depends on what the developer's priorities are.

 

[Ytsejamer1]

Outstanding...your post gave me a hint to try the 9.1 Alpha of FreeNAS. Lo and behold...all 48 disks are present and accounted for! I think I should be okay at this point. Thanks for your input and guidance!