SOLVED Showing drives of different sizes when all drives are 1Tb

P0PC47

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Hello,

I am having issues with drives showing up as different sizes when they are all the same. How do I fix this, will it effect capacity, and will it effect the hot spare. These are all mixed hard drives but all show 931.51 in Windows 10. This is why I have included a hot spare.

My thoughts are that because some drives are connected through a SAS card and others are connected through usb, they show as different capacities in TrueNAS.

Ty for any help!
Curtis
Screenshot_20210331-020955.png
 

HoneyBadger

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My thoughts are that because some drives are connected through a SAS card and others are connected through usb

I see the mfi driver in use which means you have a RAID card and not an HBA. You'll want to address that first and foremost before proceeding any further. Drives connected through USB are also not a suggested solution for anything other than single-drive pools for backup purposes - they don't handle active/regular use well.

You also have some drives showing up as 0G and 4G in size - but I imagine it is related to one of the two issues above.
 

P0PC47

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Please disregard the smaller drives. That's something I'm just experimenting with. This whole thing is just an experiment of mine to see what I can do with the extra drives and things that I have.

So your saying I should get an HBA card? Will this change the sizes to be the same? I'm using a Dell PowerEdge T320 in this configuration with this RAID card.
 

jgreco

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Please disregard the smaller drives. That's something I'm just experimenting with. This whole thing is just an experiment of mine to see what I can do with the extra drives and things that I have.

So your saying I should get an HBA card? Will this change the sizes to be the same? I'm using a Dell PowerEdge T320 in this configuration with this RAID card.

The choice of RAID card doesn't really matter. None of them are known to be problem-free. @HoneyBadger already linked to a post that explains this, and you are strongly encouraged to read that lengthy tome I wrote on the topic. If you select a way to connect HDD's to FreeNAS that isn't problem-free, you are likely to have various problems, not all of which are guaranteed to be immediately obvious, which is why we tend to hammer this point home. You will save yourself great frustration and annoyance by going and reading that post.
 
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HoneyBadger

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Please disregard the smaller drives. That's something I'm just experimenting with. This whole thing is just an experiment of mine to see what I can do with the extra drives and things that I have.
Understood. Playing around with spare parts is certainly fine, just make sure you don't accidentally add those drives to a pool you care about. :wink:

So your saying I should get an HBA card? Will this change the sizes to be the same? I'm using a Dell PowerEdge T320 in this configuration with this RAID card.
Yes, the RAID card in your system (betting on a PERC H710) is very likely consuming that small amount of space or creating a "virtual-partition" of sorts in order to be able to address the drive.

The "RAID card" you've linked (Dell PERC H310) is actually capable of being cross-flashed into a pure HBA, and as @jgreco stated it's important that you do so. The LSI HBAs specifically have an extremely well-tested and mature driver under FreeBSD.
 

P0PC47

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The "RAID card" you've linked (Dell PERC H310) is actually capable of being cross-flashed into a pure HBA, and as @jgreco stated it's important that you do so. The LSI HBAs specifically have an extremely well-tested and mature driver under FreeBSD.
So I can just use the same firmware as the LSI 9211-8i? How do I do this? Is it a bios thing or a iDRAC thing?
 

HoneyBadger

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So I can just use the same firmware as the LSI 9211-8i? How do I do this? Is it a bios thing or a iDRAC thing?

Yes, you can use the LSI 9211-8i firmware on the PERC H310 cards.


It's neither BIOS nor iDRAC, but rather a "boot into EFI or DOS and flash from there." Note that if you're planning to boot from a drive attached to the H310, you'll need to ensure that you flash the BIOS or EFI boot ROM on the card, otherwise drives will not be listed as options for boot.
 

jgreco

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How did I miss that that was an H310? Sorry 'bout that.
 
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