Adding drives to a dell perc 5/i

FredyBobJoe · September 9, 2019

i want use a dell perc 5/i that I have lying around to add hard drives to a freenas box (I know this is not recommended but too bad) so my question is if I add drives in single drive raid 0s will the perc 5/i erase them or will they retain the data?

Thanks

Turtle Rig · September 9, 2019

5 minutes ago, FredyBobJoe said:

i want use a dell perc 5/i that I have lying around to add hard drives to a freenas box (I know this is not recommended but too bad) so my question is if I add drives in single drive raid 0s will the perc 5/i erase them or will they retain the data?

Thanks

It all depends, but I would say your data is safe, but I don't know a whole lot about 5/i and what not.

September 9, 2019

1 hour ago, Turtle Rig said:

It all depends, but I would say your data is safe, but I don't know a whole lot about 5/i and what not.

Why would you say this if you have no idea how the card works? Why reply at all? What if he loses all of his data because you said it was safe based on no information or research?

OP, I do not know the answer either, but would caution you to backup any important data before attempting.

FreeNAS should be managing your storage array so you should not try to initialize the drive in the PERC menu. It will want to wipe it.

Velcade · September 9, 2019

RAID cards are not recommended with FreeNAS, that being said the card might work just fine depending on the firmware.

Do you know what firmware you're running?

WkdPaul · September 9, 2019

2 hours ago, Turtle Rig said:

It all depends, but I would say your data is safe, but I don't know a whole lot about 5/i and what not.

yeah, no ... while I never used the PERC 5/i, the Dell SAN and NAS we're using at work will erase the data if the type of RAID is changed on the drive. I highly doubt this PCIe card is different from the different RAID controllers I used.

@FredyBobJoe Try with a drive you don't care about the data that's on it and see if it's still there or not before going forward. But even if it worked on one drive doesn't mean the other drives are going to be ok.