voyager529
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2011
- Messages
- 36
What's happenin', everyone!
I'm having a two part problem with my NAS. The problems are rather interdependent, so I'm not completely convinced that separate threads will help. That said, I'll prologue with the specs:
--Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3 motherboard (http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3421&dl=1#ov)
--AMD Sempron 140
--6GBytes 1066MHz DDR3 RAM
--nvidia 9500GT (it's the only video card I had lying around)
--Some random IDE DVD/CD-RW combo drive pulled from an old HP desktop
--8x 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue 7200RPM hard disks in a single RAIDz storage pool with five datasets.
--4GByte Sandisk Cruzer Blade for FreeNAS install
--Secondary Intel Pro1000 PCI-E NIC
--FreeNAS 8.0.1 RC1
The NAS had TERRIBLE peformance as it was; it couldn't sustain throughput of any consequence - it has had the "spiked graph" issue since I first built it. I've tried both AHCI and IDE modes on the SATA controller and noticed no noticeable difference in performance. I have also tried both a Rosewill RC-209 add-in SATA card with the SI3114 chipset and a 3ware 7000 RAID card in JBOD mode. It doesn't seem to matter what I do, I couldn't kick this spiked graph issue.
A very helpful user in the IRC room suggested one of the IBM ServeRAID BR10i cards along with the IT firmware from LSI and a pair of SAS/SATA breakout cables. I stuck the card on my Windows box and flashed the firmware, and life was good, the card installed, everything was beautiful. I then attempted to put the card into the FreeNAS box, and got no love - the motherboard gives me an extended beep upon startup and won't even POST. Another helpful individual recommended to see if I could force the PCI-E slot into x8 mode instead of x16. I did so to the best of my abilities, but got the same result in both of the x16 slots that board has.
I then did two probably-bad-idea things that are probably going to make most people reading this cringe. First, I put the IBM card into my Windows box, connected all the hard disks from the FreeNAS tower (there's a LOTR: The Two Towers reference somewhere here), and brought over the FreeNAS USB drive to see if it would boot on that system. The good news is that I did, in fact, get further along in that the Windows box did POST with that card installed, indicating that the card was functioning properly. However, FreeNAS spit up LOADS of complaints during startup, and after 15 minutes, still had not gotten to a regular FreeNAS console shell. At the same time, it didn't seem to list the eight hard disks that were connected to the IBM card at any point before that.
While I had this multi-tower setup happening, I decided to take advantage of it and boot the drives into Windows to test another theory I had. I've had a sneaky suspicion that one of the drives was shot, but wanted confirmation. Therefore, I booted into Windows and ran HDTune. Sure enough, one of the drives's S.M.A.R.T. data indicated that it was in a 'warning' state. I have a spare disk sitting on top of the tower, ready to swap into a failed disks' slot, now that I had confirmation. The fact that Windows locked up a bit reading the SMART data indicated that my suspicion was likely accurate. I tracked down which drive it was based on serial number and took note of it. Once I reassembled the FreeNAS in a single tower using the original 8 SATA ports on the motherboard (which FreeNAS does at least recognize the RAIDz configuration), I attempted to use the 'replace' command in the GUI. I'm not at home right now and thus the exact error message eludes me, but it was something involving "middleware unable to...". I'll attempt to post the error text in its entirety once I get home, but ultimately I was unable to replace the disk in the array in what I believe was a 'safe' manner.
The following questions are what I need help with:
1.) Admittedly this is a bit hardware specific, but is there any known conflict that can be caused with the IBM card to the point where the motherboard doesn't POST? Is there a setting in the BIOS I should look at besides the lane speed in order to get the card and motherboard to talk to each other? I'm attempting to put in a support ticket to Gigabyte to ask them about any known issues, but does anyone else know where to look in the meantime?
2.) Why doesn't FreeNAS see the IBM card when Windows does on the same set of hardware?
3.) How do I get the drive to be replaced? Is there some known issue that my preliminary searches through the forums didn't reveal?
Thanks to everyone in advance for your help. Sorry for the lengthiness of the post, but the "how to ask a question the smart way" primer seems to have a recurring theme of "provide as much data as possible the first time around" =)
Joey
I'm having a two part problem with my NAS. The problems are rather interdependent, so I'm not completely convinced that separate threads will help. That said, I'll prologue with the specs:
--Gigabyte GA-890XA-UD3 motherboard (http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3421&dl=1#ov)
--AMD Sempron 140
--6GBytes 1066MHz DDR3 RAM
--nvidia 9500GT (it's the only video card I had lying around)
--Some random IDE DVD/CD-RW combo drive pulled from an old HP desktop
--8x 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue 7200RPM hard disks in a single RAIDz storage pool with five datasets.
--4GByte Sandisk Cruzer Blade for FreeNAS install
--Secondary Intel Pro1000 PCI-E NIC
--FreeNAS 8.0.1 RC1
The NAS had TERRIBLE peformance as it was; it couldn't sustain throughput of any consequence - it has had the "spiked graph" issue since I first built it. I've tried both AHCI and IDE modes on the SATA controller and noticed no noticeable difference in performance. I have also tried both a Rosewill RC-209 add-in SATA card with the SI3114 chipset and a 3ware 7000 RAID card in JBOD mode. It doesn't seem to matter what I do, I couldn't kick this spiked graph issue.
A very helpful user in the IRC room suggested one of the IBM ServeRAID BR10i cards along with the IT firmware from LSI and a pair of SAS/SATA breakout cables. I stuck the card on my Windows box and flashed the firmware, and life was good, the card installed, everything was beautiful. I then attempted to put the card into the FreeNAS box, and got no love - the motherboard gives me an extended beep upon startup and won't even POST. Another helpful individual recommended to see if I could force the PCI-E slot into x8 mode instead of x16. I did so to the best of my abilities, but got the same result in both of the x16 slots that board has.
I then did two probably-bad-idea things that are probably going to make most people reading this cringe. First, I put the IBM card into my Windows box, connected all the hard disks from the FreeNAS tower (there's a LOTR: The Two Towers reference somewhere here), and brought over the FreeNAS USB drive to see if it would boot on that system. The good news is that I did, in fact, get further along in that the Windows box did POST with that card installed, indicating that the card was functioning properly. However, FreeNAS spit up LOADS of complaints during startup, and after 15 minutes, still had not gotten to a regular FreeNAS console shell. At the same time, it didn't seem to list the eight hard disks that were connected to the IBM card at any point before that.
While I had this multi-tower setup happening, I decided to take advantage of it and boot the drives into Windows to test another theory I had. I've had a sneaky suspicion that one of the drives was shot, but wanted confirmation. Therefore, I booted into Windows and ran HDTune. Sure enough, one of the drives's S.M.A.R.T. data indicated that it was in a 'warning' state. I have a spare disk sitting on top of the tower, ready to swap into a failed disks' slot, now that I had confirmation. The fact that Windows locked up a bit reading the SMART data indicated that my suspicion was likely accurate. I tracked down which drive it was based on serial number and took note of it. Once I reassembled the FreeNAS in a single tower using the original 8 SATA ports on the motherboard (which FreeNAS does at least recognize the RAIDz configuration), I attempted to use the 'replace' command in the GUI. I'm not at home right now and thus the exact error message eludes me, but it was something involving "middleware unable to...". I'll attempt to post the error text in its entirety once I get home, but ultimately I was unable to replace the disk in the array in what I believe was a 'safe' manner.
The following questions are what I need help with:
1.) Admittedly this is a bit hardware specific, but is there any known conflict that can be caused with the IBM card to the point where the motherboard doesn't POST? Is there a setting in the BIOS I should look at besides the lane speed in order to get the card and motherboard to talk to each other? I'm attempting to put in a support ticket to Gigabyte to ask them about any known issues, but does anyone else know where to look in the meantime?
2.) Why doesn't FreeNAS see the IBM card when Windows does on the same set of hardware?
3.) How do I get the drive to be replaced? Is there some known issue that my preliminary searches through the forums didn't reveal?
Thanks to everyone in advance for your help. Sorry for the lengthiness of the post, but the "how to ask a question the smart way" primer seems to have a recurring theme of "provide as much data as possible the first time around" =)
Joey
