Transfer Speeds of 150 MB

[Armopop]

Hi Guys;
So I installed Freenas on a Thinkserver with LSI 9240-8i SAS controller. All disks are configured as Raid0, but on boot I see Freenas will detect Transfers of 150 MB only.
Foloowing some suggestions, I removed the volumes and kept the drives as unconfigured under LSI, but I git the same results.
I decided to use a Dell PowerEdge R710 server with a H700 controller, for my surprise the same result, transfers of 150 MB only.
What am I missing?

 

[jgreco]

Please refer to the Terminology and Abbreviations Primer. It'll help eliminate some confusing terminology you're using.

ZFS doesn't do "RAID0". I don't really know what "Transfers of 150MB only" means. If your LSI controller is giving you an option to do something with the drives, it sounds like it hasn't been flashed to IT mode. You'll want to remediate that.

 

[Armopop]

The Raid0 is done through the LSI and the H700 controller. It detects Sata 2 and Sata 3 drives as Sata1
"it sounds like it hasn't been flashed to IT mode" do we have to do that on all controllers or only specific ones? Can you elaborate more on that please?
Thank you

 

[HoneyBadger]

Both of those cards are RAID controllers, not HBAs, and neither of them is capable of operating in IT mode. They will need to be replaced by an HBA, such as the Dell PERC H200/H310 in the case of your PowerEdge R710.

 

[Armopop]

Understood, thanks.

 

[jgreco]

Both of those cards are RAID controllers, not HBAs, and neither of them is capable of operating in IT mode. They will need to be replaced by an HBA, such as the Dell PERC H200/H310 in the case of your PowerEdge R710.

Oh. Good catch, I guess my brain is fuzzy from the cold.

The Raid0 is done through the LSI and the H700 controller. It detects Sata 2 and Sata 3 drives as Sata1

Ah. Is *that* what you meant by 150MB? Not in the top 5 things I thought of/would have thought of. Anyways, the controller-side of an LSI RAID controller is all driver and software stuff, so it's possible someone locked negotiation rates in the RAID configuration, which isn't uncommon for SAS2/3 controllers which sometimes acted funky with certain kinds of early generation SATA II drives, so you might want to reset those RAID controllers to defaults and see if you get a different result. I also don't recall offhand how that presents to the host system. Because they are virtual disks, even if passed through, it can be a little screwy.

But in any case, you cannot use those with FreeNAS. They are basically not compatible. In the ZFS model, *ZFS* is your RAID controller and it expects to have direct access to all the raw disks, so it can evaluate and remediate bad disk blocks, SMART error status, etc. Having a hardware RAID card in there breaks a large part of that model.

"it sounds like it hasn't been flashed to IT mode" do we have to do that on all controllers or only specific ones? Can you elaborate more on that please?

To which

Both of those cards are RAID controllers, not HBAs, and neither of them is capable of operating in IT mode. They will need to be replaced by an HBA, such as the Dell PERC H200/H310 in the case of your PowerEdge R710.

is the correct answer. They're cheap on eBay, ~$30-$40/ea. And they are fantastic for FreeNAS.

 

[Snow]

I did read some where that some LSI do this do to the Drivers & Firmware most SAS 2008 Cards on SATA III will only Get II or I Speeds With SATA Drives and the only way to get SATA III, is to use SAS Drive's. I know this can change just from going to Raid over to IR/IT mode on the same controler you card may be able to cross flash look at this list to see if you can do it. List of LSI cards that can be cross flashed it can be cross flashed to a 9200 or 9201 In IR/IT mode.