SOLVED SMART Status with RocketRaid 2720 SGL

[BoyFonz]

Hi,

First of all, I should say I am new to FreeNas and *nix systems. So apologies if I've made some idiot mistake.

I have built a new NAS box with 6 drives in it. 2 are connected to the motherboard's SATA ports, and 4 are connected to a RocketRaid 2720 SGL via SAS.

FreeNas seems to b working well.

I ran some burn in tests on all 6 drives, and then tried to test the smart status of the drives over SSH with:

Code:

smartctl -A /dev/daX

That worked fine for the two drives attached to the motherboard directly. For the RocketRaid drives, I get the following output:

Code:

smartctl 6.3 2014-07-26 r3976 [FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE-p5 amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor:               HPT
Product:              DISK 0_0
Revision:             4.00
User Capacity:        4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]
Logical block size:   512 bytes
Device type:          disk
Local Time is:        Thu Dec 11 14:18:18 2014 PST
SMART support is:     Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
Request Sense failed, [Input/output error]
Error Counter logging not supported

Device does not support Self Test logging

All 6 drives are the same brand and model - WD Red 4TB.

The RocketRaid BIOS utility is the latest version, it is in JBOD mode and it shows SMART as enabled.

FreeNas shows all disks as Smart Enabled = true in the "View Disks" screen.

I should also mention that I was previously attempting this test on version 9.2.1.9, and I received a slightly different error message there:

Code:

CAM Status: CCB request was invalid

I have google around for a solution, but haven't really found anything I can try. It seems like I could create or edit smartd.conf (I don't seem to have one in my etc folder at the moment), but I have no idea what to put in there.

Any suggestions gratefully received. Any help on specific commands would also be useful as I'm new to the OS.

Thanks!

 

[danb35]

Highpoint controllers aren't generally recommended, partially for this reason. Does your motherboard only have two SATA ports? If that's the case, it's unlikely that it otherwise meets FreeNAS's hardware requirements. What motherboard/CPU/RAM are you running?

From what I see on eBay, the recommended IBM M1015 costs less than the RocketRAID you're using. It's known to work well once the firmware is reflashed to IT mode.

 

[BoyFonz]

Ahh, I thought I saw some quite favourable posts about the Highpoint RocketRaid cards.

I am running a Supermicro A1SAI-2550F motherboard with integrated CPU and 16GB ECC RAM.

If I can't get this solved I will look at changing RAID cards.

Thanks for the tip!

 

[danb35]

That board has six SATA ports onboard. Why are you using an addon controller?

 

[BoyFonz]

I will be adding more disks and another pool soon.

 

[danb35]

That makes sense. Ideally what you want is for your disk controller to be invisible--it shouldn't talk to SMART at all. Yours is--you can see that it's reporting itself as a HPT DISK0_0 rather than, say, a WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0 (which is what my WD Red 3 TB disks report as). This means that the OS isn't talking to the disk, it's talking to the controller masquerading as the disk, which is a Bad Thing (tm) when dealing with ZFS. I don't know if there's a way to configure that card to be more transparent, but I think that's what you'd be wanting to do if possible.

 

[BoyFonz]

Thanks very much for your help.

I have had another play around in the RocketRaid BIOS, but every configuration I try ends up with the same result - no SMART access.

I will send this card back and try the IBM M1015.