MegaRAID + Smarctl, /dev/passN and /dev/mfidN

[scebll]

Hello!

It's a pleasure to join this community.

We are starting to experiment with TrueNAS in our corporation and we have encountered some questions, which, probably due to lack of knowledge we do not know how to solve. Currently our setup (an old lab machine) is this:

Motherboard: ASUSTeK P8B WS
Processor: 1 x Intel Xeon E3-1245
Memory: 4x RAM 8192 MB DDR3 ECC
Disks: 15x HDD SATA 4,0 TB Enterprise
Others: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i + Intel RAID Expander RES2SV240

We found for example, that smartctl does not work because for this particular case we would have to pass a specific command, like this:

Code:

smartctl -a /dev/passN[1-15] -d scsi

But obviously we are not finding how to "customize" TrueNAS to do this, because for example, although TrueNAS shows it as /dev/mfidN[0-14], it should really be queried from /dev/passN[1-15].

We have seen some posts here with similar problems, and the recommendation not to use RAID cards but in our case we cannot remove the RAID card despite checking how to do it, specifically, the board does not have enough slots for so many disks.

Any ideas?

 

[jgreco]

Hello!

It's a pleasure to join this community.

We are starting to experiment with TrueNAS in our corporation and we have encountered some questions, which, probably due to lack of knowledge we do not know how to solve. Currently our setup (an old lab machine) is this:

Motherboard: ASUSTeK P8B WS
Processor: 1 x Intel Xeon E3-1245
Memory: 4x RAM 8192 MB DDR3 ECC
Disks: 15x HDD SATA 4,0 TB Enterprise
Others: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-4i + Intel RAID Expander RES2SV240

We found for example, that smartctl does not work because for this particular case we would have to pass a specific command, like this:

Code:

smartctl -a /dev/passN[1-15] -d scsi

But obviously we are not finding how to "customize" TrueNAS to do this, because for example, although TrueNAS shows it as /dev/mfidN[0-14], it should really be queried from /dev/passN[1-15].

We have seen some posts here with similar problems, and the recommendation not to use RAID cards but in our case we cannot remove the RAID card despite checking how to do it, specifically, the board does not have enough slots for so many disks.

Any ideas?

Welcome to the forums.

Alas, regardless of what you think you "cannot" do, the MFI RAID controller is not compatible with TrueNAS. Please see

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

The 9260 does not appear to be built into the board, so it is unclear why you think you "cannot" remove it and then use the 9260's former PCIe slot. Attempting to use the 9260 may eventually result in corruption and/or loss of your pool, so my suggestion is "please look harder at your options" and see if you can replace it with something like a crossflash'ed PERC H200.

 

[Ericloewe]

Just earlier today, I found an interesting tidbit in the man page for CAM (emphasis mine):

Deprecated or Poorly Supported SIM Devices:
ahd(4), amr(4), arcmsr(4), esp(4), hpt27xx(4), hptiop(4), hptmv(4),
hptnr(4), iir(4) mfi(4), sbp(4), twa(4)