Good Evening,
I am sorry but I appear to be having trouble locating an answer. I have a Truenas 13 server and also a B800i storage array. Is it possible to attach my storage array to Truenas? If so, can someone point me to the instructions with step by step?
I assume, based on Google, that this is a Drobo B800i iSCSI storage array...?
It is "possible" but it is absolutely unsupported and ill-advised to try to do so. TrueNAS expects your disks to be directly attached, via a supported connection technology such as AHCI SATA, PCH SAS, LSI SAS HBA, etc.
ZFS places crushing loads on I/O subsystems and technologies such as Fiber Channel or iSCSI do not offer sufficient bandwidth. During a scrub or resilver, ZFS will read the entirety of used space on each disk, using it to verify or reconstruct any missing data. Modern HDD's are typically capable of 2-3Gbps *each* whereas that poor excuse for an iSCSI shelf has a measly two 1Gbps ethernet ports. This would fall over and your ethernet jacks would likely start on fire under traffic from a scrub or resilver. You would ultimately have lots of problems and lots of unhappiness, especially since iSCSI resets connections when things are not going well.
The reason you are having trouble finding a pre-existing answer is because it is not supported and it is not recommended. TrueNAS also does not support making an array out of a bunch of floppy disks, but that too is an answer that's hard to find, if you can see what I'm saying there. No one even thinks of that because it's so inappropriate. It is what it is.
A list of supported and recommended options is available in the Resources section. You can absolutely add a SAS disk shelf (as long as it is just an SAS expander and does not have a RAID controller) in conjunction with an LSI HBA crossflashed to IT mode. This is the closest thing that you will find to the Drobo disk shelf. Some SAS disk shelves are fairly cheap on eBay.
