I'm kind of new to the BSD world, I come from a background of Solaris. That said I decided to explore FreeNAS 9.2.1, PC-BSD, FreeBSD-10-rc5 etc etc etc. I do use pfSense 2.1 for my home firewall. This is all for my home network. Now on my test bench I use a simple Intel Atom 525 basedwith a selection of cheap disks, usb sticks etc so I can try and find out all the bug-a-boos before I make a decision about the real hardware I want to purchase.
I've kind of noticed something really weird about the way different BSD do their installs. Some distributions seem to do it directly and some like appliances do it with images. Hang with me for a second this related to https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/2369 in some way. But I noticed
my failures of installing FreeNAS 9.2.1 Beta on hard drives turn out to be interesting.
I have a half a dozen hard drives on the test bed nothing special sata's of various size from 36G to 750G. They are tested with diags from time to time before I do installs. I've turned off almost
everything in the bios that I could find that can affect this type of problem. xchi, virtual threading, anything in the bios that could affect sata disk size or boot etc etc. But what I found is something unusual. Certain size hard drives ignore the image that was placed on hard drive to be completed for the install. So lets look at the matrix of where FreeBSD 9.2.1 Beta fails and passes to install.
Drive cap model install
Western Digital 36G WD360 passed
Maxtor 160G STM3160 failed
Maxtor 250G 6L250 passed
Seagate 500G ST3500 failed
Maxtor 500G STM3500 failed
Maxtor 500G 6H500 failed
Maxtor 500G 7H500 failed
Western Digital 500G WD500 failed
Samsung 750G HD753LJ passed
Is there some sort of magic number related to the size of the disk wither it be an actual sata, usb stick related to some bios option? Note Freebsd 10 and PC-BSD 10 install just fine on the disks that didn't quite make it with FreeNAS. Also I didn't have any other higher capacity disks for experimentation at the time.
Is there a mailing list related image installs like this? I see some what similar problems with pfSense.
By the way guys nice NAS. I see a future of root raidz, zfsd that will be a knockout.
---Bob
I've kind of noticed something really weird about the way different BSD do their installs. Some distributions seem to do it directly and some like appliances do it with images. Hang with me for a second this related to https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/2369 in some way. But I noticed
my failures of installing FreeNAS 9.2.1 Beta on hard drives turn out to be interesting.
I have a half a dozen hard drives on the test bed nothing special sata's of various size from 36G to 750G. They are tested with diags from time to time before I do installs. I've turned off almost
everything in the bios that I could find that can affect this type of problem. xchi, virtual threading, anything in the bios that could affect sata disk size or boot etc etc. But what I found is something unusual. Certain size hard drives ignore the image that was placed on hard drive to be completed for the install. So lets look at the matrix of where FreeBSD 9.2.1 Beta fails and passes to install.
Drive cap model install
Western Digital 36G WD360 passed
Maxtor 160G STM3160 failed
Maxtor 250G 6L250 passed
Seagate 500G ST3500 failed
Maxtor 500G STM3500 failed
Maxtor 500G 6H500 failed
Maxtor 500G 7H500 failed
Western Digital 500G WD500 failed
Samsung 750G HD753LJ passed
Is there some sort of magic number related to the size of the disk wither it be an actual sata, usb stick related to some bios option? Note Freebsd 10 and PC-BSD 10 install just fine on the disks that didn't quite make it with FreeNAS. Also I didn't have any other higher capacity disks for experimentation at the time.
Is there a mailing list related image installs like this? I see some what similar problems with pfSense.
By the way guys nice NAS. I see a future of root raidz, zfsd that will be a knockout.
---Bob
