Optimimal BIOS Settings

[Mike Bruns]

Hi all, I have a quick question on optimal BIOS settings:

Proposed system:
Server: Dell Poweredge T110 ii
CPU: I3-2120 3.30ghz
RAM: 16gb
Drives: 4x 6TB WL
Boot USB: 2x Sandisk UltraFit 16gb
Raid: RaidZ1

I realize it's a bit of a hodge-podge setup. The Dell Poweredge was $220 on Black-Friday, and I'm going to test the heck out of the 6TB White-Label drives before use. This is mostly for media, everything important will be backed-up off-site through other means.

Bios Questions:
1) Virtualization Technology? Does Freenas take advantage of the Intel VT-X features if I'm running ? The default is Off
2) Execute Disable? Default is on, is there any overhead?
3) OS Watchdog Timer (WDAT which is part of the ACPI specifications). Does Freenas support WDAT? Default is off.

For everything else, I'm using default settings or "ON" or "enabled" features. Are there any other non-obvious BIOS settings I should be aware of?

 

[mav@]

1) FreeNAS itself does not use virtualization. But it is possible to run virtualbox under FreeNAS 9, and should be possible to run bhyve under FreeNAS 10.
2) IIRC Execute Disable has overhead for 32-bit non-PAE OS, but should be free for 64-bit.
3) FreeNAS supports several different flavors of watchdog timers. If after enabling it system won't automatically reboot each few minutes after boot, then it is probably supported. :)

I would start checking from SATA controller mode. Make sure it is set to AHCI.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

1. Set it to On.
2. Leave it On.
3. Might want to leave it Off, based on various reports of random reboots that may be related to watchdog timers (not specific to the T110ii).

 

[rsquared]

1. Set it to On.
2. Leave it On.
3. Might want to leave it Off, based on various reports of random reboots that may be related to watchdog timers (not specific to the T110ii).

The random reboots were fixed with the 1128 release.

Sent from my K007 using Tapatalk

 

[Mike Bruns]

Thanks!

Quick follow-up: I had to install setting the boot mode to BIOS rather than UEFI. I burned FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201509022158.iso to a CD. I burned it to 2 different disks, using the Windows 10 embedded disk burning utility.

I believe my server is setup properly, as Windows 2012, Ubuntu 15.10, and Memtest boot just fine in UEFI mode. The burned FreeNAS CD gives a boot-disk not found. The installation docs mentioned this was a possibility.

The install seemed to go just fine in BIOS mode. Is there anything I should have done differently, or any downside to installing this way?

 

[mav@]

I've never tried, but don't think that FreeNAS 9 supports UEFI booting. May be FreeNAS 10 can in its time, but that is not soon yet. I don't think there are many requirements now to boot in UEFI mode. UEFI may probably reduce boot time a bit, allow booting from some very new devices, such as NVMe SSDs, but that should be about all.