Will disabling / turning to AHCI built in RAID card work for Freenas?

[Cadabri]

Hey guys! I recently purchased a Dell r720 off facebook, and now that I am messing with it, I see that the drives go directly from the backplane to a slot in the MOBO, with the raid card beside it. I asked in the LinusTechTips forums if I would be able to just disable the raid card for the drives to work with ZFS, and one suggested that even though the cable goes into the MOBO, it still may be forced through the raid card internally. He also suggested that if I turn the raid card to AHCI mode in the bios, that that should work. How should I go about setting this up for Freenas?

Image of the raid card - https://imgur.com/a/3h7SjMj
Image of BIOS settings - https://imgur.com/a/Ecq5wpX

• Motherboard make and model - Unsure
• CPU make and model - Intel E5 2640 x2
• RAM quantity - 32
• Hard drives, quantity, model numbers, and RAID configuration, including boot drives - Hard drives not yet installed, USB bootdrive
• Hard disk controllers - Unsure
• Network cards - Unsure

 

[Fredda]

It would help if you could post the model of RAID card involved. The Dell R720 comes with different options.
If it is e.g. a Perc H310, this can be flashed with IT firmware, which is the way to go for FreeNAS.

 

[Cadabri]

It would help if you could post the model of RAID card involved. The Dell R720 comes with different options.
If it is e.g. a Perc H310, this can be flashed with IT firmware, which is the way to go for FreeNAS.

HI, I just did a system lookup on the Dell website, according to that it is a PERC H710P

 

[Fredda]

This card seems to be based on the LSI 2208 RAID chip, which is not a good choice for FreeNAS. See here.

 

[Cadabri]

This card seems to be based on the LSI 2208 RAID chip, which is not a good choice for FreeNAS. See here.

So should I get a H310 card and pop it in? Would that work?

 

[Fredda]

This should probably work, as the data sheet of your server mentions this card as an option.
From the image it looks like your card is not a PCI-E card but a "Mini Monolithic" or "Mini Blade" card.
But I don't have experience with that type of cards or dell servers.

 

[Cadabri]

This should probably work, as the data sheet of your server mentions this card as an option.
From the image it looks like your card is not a PCI-E card but a "Mini Monolithic" or "Mini Blade" card.
But I don't have experience with that type of cards or dell servers.

I was looking up the 310 process, however it seems as if that one is still not completely well documented, however during my research I found this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l41rhE79vqU
Would I not be able to just get one of those PERC 9 cards and just put it into HBA?

 

[Fredda]

I can't tell you what chipset is in the PERC 9 series. The usual recommendation around here is to go with a LSI (now broadcom) based
card which does support IT mode.
For the 310, you can buy on ebay cards, with preinstalled IT, e.g. here