SD Card Installation - Question

[BigBadBooey]

Hi all,

Just a quick question - I have searched for the answer elsewhere and not found it but apologies in advance if I have missed it.

I am installing FreeNAS on a HP DL380 G8 server with 8 x 600Gb 15k Hard Drives. I tried installing using a Sandisk Extreme 20Mb/s 16Gb card and kept getting boot failures from the outset.

I have, however, successfully managed to boot using a Sandisk 8Gb USB stick and also now a Sandisk 8Gb standard SD card.

My questions really are purely for interest and perhaps assistance for others in the future:

a) The 16Gb SD card is working fine in other appliances so is the fact its 16Gb the issue?
b) Will I see any 'performance hit' by using a standard SD card over the Extreme version - or once FreeNAS is loaded into memory does it no longer require the SD/USB device?

Many thanks - looking forward to using FreeNAS!

 

[cyberjock]

a) No clue why the 16GB card didn't work. I know I've had mixed results with SD cards. Presumably something is lost in translation from SD card to USB, etc.
b) Nope. It might be a little slower to load, but once FreeNAS has booted up the system will perform the same. The system is cached in RAM. :)

 

[BigBadBooey]

Thanks for the (very) quick response Cyberjock. Its working on the 8Gb SD card now so I'll leave that running.

Next question - I'm running a HP P420i card with 2Gb Cache connected to 8 x 600Gb 15k hard drives. I currently have this set as 4.2Tb via RAID 5 using the inbuilt HP SmartArray software.

Obviously FreeNAS sees this has a single 4.2Tb drive and allows me to create a ZFS Volume which gives me 3.8 TiB - am I better removing the HP SmartArray RAID and using FreeNAS ZFS do you think? Will there be a performance issue?

 

[cyberjock]

Obviously FreeNAS sees this has a single 4.2Tb drive and allows me to create a ZFS Volume which gives me 3.8 TiB - am I better removing the HP SmartArray RAID and using FreeNAS ZFS do you think? Will there be a performance issue?

Absolutely. Do not mix hardware and software RAID.

You should have created a new thread though.. cause the topic was SD cards...

 

[BigBadBooey]

Okay, have some more questions on that CJ so will do that now.... Apologies....