New SSD drives not detected in my new supermicro truenas system

[SgtRaj12]

Hi all,
have been a long follower of this forum and have always appreciated the support you guys have been providing. i am a long time freenas user but in smaller capacity. i am not a technical person but have made 4 freenas system for my animation studios. so now the story starts. this time around as part of our upgradation we wanted to create a high speed NAS using SSDs. so we bought this system

Tyrone Server: Camarero SS400E1R-424R

• Processor 1 x Intel 4208 2P 8C/16T 2.1G 11M 9.6GT 85W
• Chipset Intel C621
• RAM 4 x 8GB (Total 32GB) DDR4 2933ECC RDIMM (8DIMMs)
• SSD 6 x 4TB SATA 2.5" SSD SAMSUNG 870 EVO
• NVME 1 X 250 GB M.2 SAMSUNG 980 EVO
• RAID AOC S3108L-H8iR
• IPMI 2.0 with virtual media over LAN and KVM-over-LAN
• 2 RJ45 GbE LAN ports (rear) and 2 Ports 10G baseT Ports by AOC
• Exp. Slots 2 PCI-E 3.0 x8 (in x16), 4 PCI-E 3.0 x8,1 PCI-E 3.0 x4 (in x8)
• Ports 2 RJ45 GbE LAN, 1 RJ45 Dedicated IPMI LAN, 2 USB 3.0, 1 VGA
• Chassis 4U rack mountable (24x 3.5" hot-swap SAS/SATA drive bays)
• P. Supply Redundant 1200W Titanium Level power supply

so its a premade system with supermicro motherboard, 10G nic and a LSI 3108 raid controller and 24 drive bays. I installed truenas 12.0 U8 version on the nvme drive in UEFI mode and was able to boot. but unfortunately none of the 6 ssd drives are visible in the truenas user interface so that i can create a pool. i have read about apprehensions towards using raid controllers but my vendor assured that this card will work and will give me freedom for future expansion. all the drives are working as i checked them in my windows system. during the booting the LSI raid controller also detects all the 6 SSD. Can some please help me, what can be done so that all the drives are detected in truenas.

 

[Alecmascot]

You probably have to configure the drives in the LSI3108 bios.
Read this first :

LSI 3108 IT Mode

Hello all! Searching around on the forum and on Google hasn't given the results I'm looking for so here we are! Does any one know if the on board LSI 3108 can be flashed to IT mode? Thank you in advance!

www.truenas.com

 

[SgtRaj12]

thanks for pointing me towards this thread. let me try to configure them in JBOD using the raid bios. hope that will post the ssd in truenas. will update soon

 

[jgreco]

RAID AOC S3108L-H8iR

This is not acceptable for use 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

 

[c77dk]

..... i have read about apprehensions towards using raid controllers but my vendor assured that this card will work and will give me freedom for future expansion.

That vendor have no clue about ZFS - you should have a HBA instead, and you'll still be able to expand.

 

[SgtRaj12]

This is not acceptable for use 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

Hi,
thanks for replying. yes after reading all these threads i now understand why a HBA needs to be used instead of a raid card. unfortunately here in my city Ahmadabad, India, we dont have vendors selling these HBA cards. and the few certified vendors we do have sells only pre configured systems. there also hardly any trusted vendors selling such cards. so currently i am stuck with this card. by configuring the drives as jbod i was able to see the drives in truenas and was able to create a pool. as of now i am running some tests and will keep updating the thread.

 

[SgtRaj12]

This is not acceptable for use 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

meanwhile i am do interested in exploring a HBA card. can you please let me know which card i should order which can handle 24 drives with high through put. or any site which ship such cards?

 

[NugentS]

Lets hope I get this right.
That AOC card has 2 plug connectors on it - which means it can run 8 disks natively, using 1 to 4 cables
You have a 24bay chassis - and I assume all the drive bays work. In which case you are using a SAS expander. This is either a card plugged into the server - or the case has a SAS Expander backplane built in. (If its a SMC case, the the expander is probably built into the motherboard.

Exactly what model of case have you got?

In theory all you have to do is replace the AOC Card with an non-RAID, IT Mode card. As you are using SSD's you are looking for a SAS3 card
LSI 93xx-8i would be your starting point, or its equivalent (and there in lies the minefield)

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/164916581193?epid=17045099504&hash=item2665cb5349:g:HUkAAOSwTVNhh6At would be a good card from a legit seller - based in the US though.

The main problem is that there are a number of fakes out there, sold by less than legit sellers, mostly based in China. Lots available - they may work, but also may cause issues. If you can buy from a seller that is selling lots of different IT kit (ie looks as though he is dismantling older kit). Or you could buy a new one (as the rest of the kit is new) from a legit shop

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/8-port-broadcom-sas-9300-8i-single-internal-12gb-s-sataplussas-pcie-30-hba

Any new card, and many old cards will come ith IR mode firmware. You need IT Mode firmware for TrueNAS, but the cards can be flashed to IT mode quite easily (or get your chosen vendor to do it)