SOLVED Newbie - Missing Drives and RAID Question

[Sc0ttJM]

Hi all, I'm completely new to TrueNAS and only just discovered it so I'm keen to get up and running.

I've bought a refurbished Dell PowerEdge R720xd with 2 x 300GB SAS 15K drives for the OS and 8 x 4TB 10K SAS for storage.

My plan was to used RAID1/Mirror for the OS and RAID10 for the remainder for storage.

I created the 2 Virtual Disks in the RAID setup after booting, then installed TrueNAS on the OS RAID1 volume, but then when creating a pool, I get a warning about adding a stripe set.

I thought I must have made a mistake and maybe TrueNAS wants/needs to handle the RAID itself, so I started again and deleted the virtual disk, but now I can't see the disks at all in TrueNAS.

I know this must be something simple I'm missing but I promise I've searched and I get conflicting information so I'm looking for a simplified answer if possible please?

Thanks in advance
Scott

 

[Ericloewe]

Well, you need to get rid of the RAID controller and replace it with an HBA. That will solve your immediate "no disks found" issue and the not-yet-encountered "my performance is terrible" and "I lost my data" issues so typical of hardware RAID. See also: https://www.truenas.com/community/r...bas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.139/

 

[Sc0ttJM]

Wow, thanks @Ericloewe that was an impressively quick response!
Thanks for the info, looks like I've made a boo boo here then.
I paid extra for the RAID controller too thinking I was doing the right thing.
The trouble is that I can't find a HBA now for this server and I'm out of budget too.
What would happen if I created 1 RAID1 set for teh OS and 8 RAID0 sets each with 1 disk, the disks are then visible in TrueNAS, would that work?
Luckily this is only my secondary tier storage for this project so it's only for backups and archive which will then be offloaded to Wasabi.
Thanks again for the fast reply, it's reassuring and great to see when you're new to a forum and a project like this, gives you real confidence in community support!

 

[garm]

Wow, thanks @Ericloewe that was an impressively quick response!
Thanks for the info, looks like I've made a boo boo here then.
I paid extra for the RAID controller too thinking I was doing the right thing.
The trouble is that I can't find a HBA now for this server and I'm out of budget too.

You can find good cards on ebay, I even run a €ina copy in my server and its been running fine for years

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What would happen if I created 1 RAID1 set for teh OS and 8 RAID0 sets each with 1 disk, the disks are then visible in TrueNAS, would that work?
Luckily this is only my secondary tier storage for this project so it's only for backups and archive which will then be offloaded to Wasabi.
Thanks again for the fast reply, it's reassuring and great to see when you're new to a forum and a project like this, gives you real confidence in community support!

ZFS expects to get hardware access to drives, if you put a RAID layer in-between you will lose data, search the forum, its full of such tears

 

[Ericloewe]

What would happen if I created 1 RAID1 set for teh OS and 8 RAID0 sets each with 1 disk, the disks are then visible in TrueNAS, would that work?

Nothing good, unfortunately. The OS would not be the end of the world, but anything needing vaguely-serious performance would suffer.

I got stuck with a Dell R6515 at work with a high-end RAID controller and needed to just hack together some space for a couple of VMs that were not critical in terms of storage performance, so I did what you were proposing with two SATA SSDs. It was atrocious. Formerly CPU-bound tasks turned into IO-bound tasks that took three times as long. And that's before we get into any questions of data integrity in the long-term. Monitoring disks behind HW RAID is notoriously difficult.

That said, you may be able to crossflash your RAID controller, depending on the model. Dell H710 in a Gen 12 system, possibly? Have a look at this: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/cross-flashing-dell-h310-h710-mini-to-it-mode.166/

If that doesn't help, my recommendation is to sell the RAID controller and buy an HBA. Might end up cash positive in the end.

 

[Sc0ttJM]

You guys are awesome, I've never seen such a responsive community forum!
Thanks again @Ericloewe The H710 mini is exactly what I have, so I guess I need to see if the part number matches the one on the successfully flashed devices mentioned.

 

[Sc0ttJM]

Hi all, apologies for the delayed update, it's been crazy busy!

I've followed the excellent guide on flashing the H710 (thanks again @Ericloewe) and it all seems to have worked perfectly, however...

I now cannot get the server to boot from the installed TrueNAS OS on either of the 2x Rear (flex bay) 2.5" drives.
I've tried re-installing a few times and the server just doesn't see the bootable drives.

The message displayed on the server says:

No boot device available.​

Current boot mode is set to BIOS​

Please ensure compatible bootable media is available.​

Use the system setup program to change the boot mode as needed.​

​

Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for system setup, F11 for BIOS boot manager.​

If I Press Ctrl-C when booting to view the attached disks, all 10 disks are shown.
I've tried installing TrueNAS onto both 300GB Drives shown at the bottom of the list in the attached image:



I'm using a Dell R720xd server.

Any help would be gratefully received.

Thanks

 

[HoneyBadger]

It looks like you've managed to preserve the boot ROM on your now-HBA - if you manually try to force the boot via F11, does it work? Have you set the rear bay(s) as bootable in the BIOS (Dell and LSI) setup program?

 

[Ericloewe]

For BIOS boot, you need to configure the SAS BIOS extension ROM to boot from those disks and can't rely on iDRAC to do so, since it no longer knows how to talk to the card.
In summary, it should be something like:

• Boot order: SAS2308 at the top
• SAS2308 BIOS: Choose your boot device for boot

For UEFI boot, it should be slightly simpler, because you can do everything from the setup menu, as the extension ROMs are integrated with the UEFI menus, but the concept is the same.

 

[Sc0ttJM]

@HoneyBadger I can't force a boot using F11. I don't know how to set the rear drives as bootable in BIOS?

I've gone into the setup utility on boot by pressing Ctrl-C and I get the attached screen:



There are only 3 options and only 1 adapter to select from so I can't change anything in here.

When I boot into BIOS and view the Boot Settings, I can only see a "Hard Drive C:" and 3 NIC Cards:



Selecting the Hard Drive gives me just one of teh 10 installed drives listed.

 

[Ericloewe]

Can you choose to put your boot disks at the top in the Hard-Disk Drive Sequence section?

 

[HoneyBadger]

You'll have to change the boot device In the LSI BIOS itself (Ins/Del) as right now it's using LUN0 which is the first 4TB Seagate ES.3 in bay 0 (you can see in the Dell BIOS)

This video from ArtOfServer seems to go through the process in all of the steps - although it's a little lengthy. I don't have something in front of me I can screenshot right now unfortunately.

How to select boot device in LSI IT mode HBA SAS controller

In this video, I show you how to select the preferred and alternative boot devices in an LSI IT mode HBA SAS controller.For pre-flashed IT mode HBA SAS contr...

www.youtube.com

 

[Sc0ttJM]

@HoneyBadger you're my new favourite type of badger!

This worked perfectly, thanks so much, I would never have worked that out, the utility doesn't even show the Alt-B and Alt-A options in the menu at the bottom. Now for the fun bit, I can start playing with TrueNAS.

How do I mark this resolved?

 

[Ericloewe]

It's in the edit thread option towards the top of the posts. I've marked it solved for you.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Glad this worked out for you.

Now for the fun bit, I can start playing with TrueNAS.

Enjoy the learning experience. What's going to be stored on it?

 

[Sc0ttJM]

This unit will be used purely for backup and Archives as a "local" target then data offloaded or replicated to Wasabi.
As a newcomer I'm just seeing more and more value in the product and it seems much more advanced than I realised so I'm going to lookinto what it can do a bit more.