Joey DiJulio
Dabbler
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2014
- Messages
- 10
Hello all,
I've read enough forum posts to get the gist that the having drives presented to FreeNAS / ZFS as RAID volumes (i.e., setup a RAID-something array on a controller card and export that logical volume to FreeNAS to use for ZFS) is a bad idea - and that the better idea is to simply pass drives through as unadulterated as possible.
I've also read enough forum posts to learn that the particular RAID controller I was hoping to use - a 3ware 9550sx-12 card - is also particularly bad for use with FreeNAS due to, among other things, it's inability to easily pass drives through un-touched (i.e., I may have to make 12 independent "single-disk-RAID sets", which makes me shudder).
In addition, I've noted that the particular "card of choice" seems to be the LSI / IBM M1015.
So, having established all of that, I'll get to my question:
I've got a chassis that I want to use for a lab / test environment that has 12 SATA 2 drive bays. I'd like to use all of them. First issue seems to be that the M1015 is an 8-port card.
The bigger problem is that it's only a PCI-X capable board. There are NO PCIe slots on the board whatsoever.
That said, this particular Intel branded board fortunately has about the best PCI-X design you could have, though, in that each PCI-X slot was ran independently (not shared with each other) - so even with a few other I/O cards (NICs, mainly), I should actually get pretty decent (for the era / technology) throughput out of each PCI-X slot. Not as great as a few PCIe slots, but better than 3 PCI-X slots on a single, shared bus.
The M1015, though, is PCIe (from everything I've seen). So it seems like that's just going to be a no-go for this project.
So... Without getting into a "you really need to buy a new system" conversation (because, again, this is a lab / test box, not something that has production work loads on it), I'm just wondering what people have found to be the best PCI-X based card for use with FreeNAS.
Side note - I'm somewhat bummed that the 9550sx-12 that I have gives FreeNAS so much trouble. In a Windows environment, I've actually had really, really great luck with them. In fact, when I call LSI for question on them, I STILL get phone support (for free!) which is amazing for such an old card. In fact, it still amazes me that the last time I called LSI for phone support a warm body picked up the phone right away. Not even a phone tree to hassle with, just a tech after 2 or 3 rings!
If anyone can offer some recommendations on what a good alternative would be, I would much appreciate it!
Or, if it's possible to get the 9550sx-12 to work reasonably well in some fashion with a few tweaks, I'd be interested in hearing how.
Thanks in advance!
I've read enough forum posts to get the gist that the having drives presented to FreeNAS / ZFS as RAID volumes (i.e., setup a RAID-something array on a controller card and export that logical volume to FreeNAS to use for ZFS) is a bad idea - and that the better idea is to simply pass drives through as unadulterated as possible.
I've also read enough forum posts to learn that the particular RAID controller I was hoping to use - a 3ware 9550sx-12 card - is also particularly bad for use with FreeNAS due to, among other things, it's inability to easily pass drives through un-touched (i.e., I may have to make 12 independent "single-disk-RAID sets", which makes me shudder).
In addition, I've noted that the particular "card of choice" seems to be the LSI / IBM M1015.
So, having established all of that, I'll get to my question:
I've got a chassis that I want to use for a lab / test environment that has 12 SATA 2 drive bays. I'd like to use all of them. First issue seems to be that the M1015 is an 8-port card.
The bigger problem is that it's only a PCI-X capable board. There are NO PCIe slots on the board whatsoever.
That said, this particular Intel branded board fortunately has about the best PCI-X design you could have, though, in that each PCI-X slot was ran independently (not shared with each other) - so even with a few other I/O cards (NICs, mainly), I should actually get pretty decent (for the era / technology) throughput out of each PCI-X slot. Not as great as a few PCIe slots, but better than 3 PCI-X slots on a single, shared bus.
The M1015, though, is PCIe (from everything I've seen). So it seems like that's just going to be a no-go for this project.
So... Without getting into a "you really need to buy a new system" conversation (because, again, this is a lab / test box, not something that has production work loads on it), I'm just wondering what people have found to be the best PCI-X based card for use with FreeNAS.
Side note - I'm somewhat bummed that the 9550sx-12 that I have gives FreeNAS so much trouble. In a Windows environment, I've actually had really, really great luck with them. In fact, when I call LSI for question on them, I STILL get phone support (for free!) which is amazing for such an old card. In fact, it still amazes me that the last time I called LSI for phone support a warm body picked up the phone right away. Not even a phone tree to hassle with, just a tech after 2 or 3 rings!
If anyone can offer some recommendations on what a good alternative would be, I would much appreciate it!
Or, if it's possible to get the 9550sx-12 to work reasonably well in some fashion with a few tweaks, I'd be interested in hearing how.
Thanks in advance!
