RAID question

[dtsteinb]

I have a Dell PowerEdge R710. Right now I have 4 drives in RAID5 that I want to use with FreeNAS. My question is should I break the RAID5 convert the drives to RAID0 and have FreeNAS set the raid or leave it as is and make the total drive space the LUN?

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

Short answer: No. Just no.

Long answer: If your disk controller doesn't have the ability to work transparently - no RAID at all - it is likely a poor choice for use with FreeNAS. RAID0 isn't the same as an HBA without any level of RAID processing being applied.

So, before you do anything, I'd suggest you make sure the hardware you have at your disposal has the ability to pass the drives to FreeNAS without any RAID processing. You certainly don't want to hand FreeNAS a RAID5 group of drives but you also don't want it handing off RAID0 drives.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[dtsteinb]

Short answer: No. Just no.

Long answer: If your disk controller doesn't have the ability to work transparently - no RAID at all - it is likely a poor choice for use with FreeNAS. RAID0 isn't the same as an HBA without any level of RAID processing being applied.

So, before you do anything, I'd suggest you make sure the hardware you have at your disposal has the ability to pass the drives to FreeNAS without any RAID processing. You certainly don't want to hand FreeNAS a RAID5 group of drives but you also don't want it handing off RAID0 drives.

Cheers,
Matt

I am running this in VMWare not bare metal. I dont think there is any other way besides setting these drives in RAID that VMWARE will see this an then I can provision hard drives to FreeNas. This is a lab environment.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

This is a lab environment.

Lab? Playful testing? Performance and reliability of no concern? Just want to get a feel for the interface?

If that's the case, it doesn't matter how you hand off the disk space to the VM. You have my blessing.

For testing, we hand off three chunks from XenServer to the VM in which FreeNAS lives. One is tiny for the FreeNAS boot partition. The other two chunks are the same size and we configure them as mirrored disks.

Anything more than playing and you should really have an HBA passed through to the VM instance where FreeNAS lives.

Cheers,
Matt