LSI 9207-8i Question

[Operandi]

Hey there.

So I've been procuring hardware for my home (TruNAS) NAS build for about a year now; one of the first pieces of hardware was SAS card, a LSI 9260-8i. At the time I knew it was a RAID card but I figured I could just build a large pool or storage and let FreeNAS / ZFS handle the parity. Having done a bit of research now that this is not going to play well with TrueNAS.

I'm now looking at a LSI 9207. The eBay seller I'm looking at is selling cards with the IT mode firmware pre-flashed and tested (P20 20.00.07.00). I'm going off Serve the Home's top pics for FreeNas page and assume this is still a solid solution?

The seller also asks if I'd a Legacy or UEFI BIOS. Is Legacy just more compatible with server hardware and UEFI would be more for consumer boards? Is it typically just a setting on the card or does it need to be re-flashed?

The board I'm using is relatively modern Supermicro X11SSH-F (Intel C236 chipset) so UEFI?

 

[Samuel Tai]

The manual for the X11-SSH-F indicates this board can boots via either legacy BIOS or UEFI. See Section 4.7 on p. 106. For TrueNAS, UEFI is recommended. For storage controllers, see p. 89 to set the BIOS to load the storage controller boot ROM via UEFI.

 

[Operandi]

I don't plan to boot from the controller card, I'll be installing FreeNAS onto a NVMe drive so if the BIOS selection of Legacy or UEFI is about booting then I guess it dosn't matter?

Mostly I'd just like to know if the LSI 9207-8i is the card I should be looking at or if there is something better for FreeNAS.

 

[Operandi]

I don't plan to boot from the controller card, I'll be installing FreeNAS onto a NVMe drive so if the BIOS selection of Legacy or UEFI is about booting then I guess it dosn't matter?

Mostly I'd just like to know if the LSI 9207-8i is the card I should be looking at or if there is something better for FreeNAS.

I misread the listing for the card, the UEFI or Legacy BIOS is only referring to boot services of the card which the seller removes by default which I'm fine with. Initially I read as compatibility thing with UEFI or BIOS based boards in general.

So the only question is if the 9207 is the card to go with or if there is something better?

Performance isn't really an issue; this is more of just a learning project that will ultimately a media and backup server but as part of the 'learning' I want to make it as reliable as possible (hence the Supermicro server board).

 

[jgreco]

The 9207-8i is inexpensive, easily available, and absolutely fine for hard drives. If you were going to make heavy use of SSD's, it might not be the best choice.

 

[Operandi]

The 9207-8i is inexpensive, easily available, and absolutely fine for hard drives. If you were going to make heavy use of SSD's, it might not be the best choice.

Great thats what I'll be going with then and post back when its up and running. Thanks!

 

[Operandi]

Update. Got my 9207-8i from eBay seller bitsquad, card works great and was reasonably priced so if anyone is looking for 9207 thats a good source.

A bit of mini review short take on TrueNAS from a new user if anyone cares. I haven't had a ton of time to play with the system yet but TrueNAS has come a long way since I tried it as FreeNAS. The capabilities have really expanded and the UI has gone from major drawback to one a strengths, its not perfect but its really good. So far I've just created a few shares, created some users, turned on a few Jails, and installed Plex and got that working. All works pretty well and not too many stumbling blocks but whats starting to hit me is TrueNAS might not be the right choice due to the limiting nature of FreeBSD jails, Linux just has so many more options in the form of Docker that make it more appealing for home system. As a NAS though TrueNAS is pretty impressive and I really want to use it more so maybe I'll use it as pure NAS and another system to run Docker containers out of, we'll see. Either way if I don't use it home I'll almost certainly be using it elsewhere.

 

[LarsR]

You could also take a look at Scale, which is debian based and can run docker with kubernetes

 

[Operandi]

You could also take a look at Scale, which is debian based and can run docker with kubernetes

Ok, shits getting complicated.

Without derailing this LSI 9207 thread into something else is there a brief primmer as to what Scale is supposed to be? I saw Scale when I started this but.... "scale-out storage and hyper-convergence ", and "Best for: Development Labs, Data Centers" makes it sound like this not for home users at all so I moved along. It's free but its for data centers? Is this going to be the future platform for Core? I really don't get what this is supposed to be in relation to Core and Enterprise, which make perfect sense.

I don't really want to get on some transitional platform thats half supported.

 

[LarsR]

Truenas scale has the capability to scale out by creating a cluster with multiple servers. But you can also just use it with a single NAS/Server.