On board controllers that work with FreeNAS?

[Samwarez]

Does anyone know if on-board Intel controllers (specifically the Intel ESB2 as found on the SuperMicro X7DBU) can be setup as just an HBA so that it works with FreeNAS?

I have the distinct honor of building a new file server for the small company I work for, but they gave me a really tight budget and if I can forgo separate controller that would give me a lot more breathing room.

 

[depasseg]

1st question before I do any more research: You will be limited to 2TB drives. Is that OK?

 

[HoneyBadger]

To answer the titular question: I believe you can switch the onboard controller to AHCI mode in the BIOS.

If you're on a tight budget, consider Dell PERC H200 or H310 controllers that can be reflashed into the LSI 9211-8i.

Can you give us an idea of just how tight this budget is, and what your company is expecting? The fact that you're using a 5400-series Xeon seems to imply it's pretty much "duct tape, popsicle sticks, and bailing wire" level of budget, so they should expect to get out what they're putting in here.

 

[Samwarez]

2tb drives would be fine, The budget is under $500 (due to tax reasons I'm told), but if needed we might be able to swing the drives as a separate purchase but that's a big maybe. It doesn't need to be much, a couple terabytes with some redundancy is fine. Its for non-critical files that need to be shared. I am going to push for a bit more leeway with the budget so that we can have something that can safely store everything with room to grow, but I figure I should also give them a good idea of what the $500 well get them.

At first I suggested a simple networkable HD enclosure, in fact this will replace an old Buffalo Linkstation that died, however they want the new filestore it to work with a SSO solution like Kerberos or LDAP. I was thinking of getting one of these 1u supermicros off Ebay, and throwing in 4 x 1TB WD Red drives. We plan to do a regular backup to an external drive so I think we can get away with just raidz1.

 

[HoneyBadger]

With a $500 budget you're probably on the right track there as far as buying a premade chassis and just dropping in drives.

I'd try to find something from the X8 series for SuperMicro so you're at least off of LGA771, but if you're not paying the power bill and dollars saved is more important than bits moved, the X7 ones are fine.

Just be certain that the onboard SATA controller is capable of acting in AHCI/JBOD mode.

 

[Samwarez]

thank you, A little research showed it should be possible to use the controller in AHCI mode.