Using hardware RAID

[qRRA]

Hi,
I'm a newbie to FreeNAS and would like to get help on the configuration of the disks;)

I've jsut set up a NAS with FreeNAS 9.1.1 on a SUPERMICRO P8SC8 with hardware RAID support:
- IDE disk used for FreeNAS system
- 2 SATA 500GB configure with RAID 1 type via the onboard controller.

After installation completes, the 2 disks are visible under the menu Storage>View volumes.

Questions:
1- I can't see the RAID volume created with the onboard hardware raid. why?

Can you please help?

Regards

 

[pirateghost]

I will bet money that the 'raid' you configured is nothing more than fakeraid. Not an actual hardware raid. Why would you want to use a hardware raid with freenas anyway?

 

[cyberjock]

I will bet money that the 'raid' you configured is nothing more than fakeraid. Not an actual hardware raid. Why would you want to use a hardware raid with freenas anyway?

^^^ Plus if you read the manual you shouldn't be mixing hardware RAID with ZFS.

 

[qRRA]

I'm not trying to mix up Hardware RAID with ZFS.

Just got poor performance with ZFS and ESXi hosts hang when the ZFS volume was presented to 2 hosts via iSCSI. Maybe I'm missing something?

Would just like to see if the performance are better with the hardware raid. Will then present the volume created by the hardware raid as a device through iSCSI.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, um, well then, let us know when you actually get a hardware RAID controller. That board does not offer hardware RAID for the SATA ports, only for SCSI. And then only if you have the ZCR card.

You can also just set up UFS as a mirror, which is very, very low overhead. That'll do as well as your drives allow.

 

[qRRA]

Don't understand what u mean by

That board does not offer hardware RAID for the SATA ports, only for SCSI. And then only if you have the ZCR card.

You can created 2 type of RAID with SATA drives with this board (1, 0). ?

 

[jgreco]

Yes, but it IS NOT HARDWARE RAID. It is SOFTWARE RAID. The BIOS has a barebones software implementation that does just enough to allow a special RAID device driver under Windows to get loaded.

FreeNAS does not have that magic Windows driver installed, so the SATA RAID options do not work.

You can safely not worry about any of that and just do what I suggested, which actually gets you the same result.

 

[qRRA]

Thanks jgreco, it's more clear now for me

@ cyberjock: Thanks for the links :)

 

[cyberjock]

Thanks jgreco, it's more clear now for me

@ cyberjock: Thanks for the links :)

Links?

Edit: Oh, my signature. You're welcome. Those weren't directed at you, but most people can benefit from reading them.

 

[qRRA]

;)

 

[jgreco]

Thanks jgreco, it's more clear now for me

Yup. So the UFS RAID1 (mirror) option in FreeNAS gets you about the same thing, but probably more competently designed for UFS compatibility. Try it out.