Installing RAID Card Driver FreeNAS

[FinnFixitMan]

So I resently got a new Server (Dell Poweredge R510) and im trying to install the raid card driver after I installed FreeNAS to a USB stick which is Internal on the motherboard.

Due to not having the driver, FreeNAS is unable to detect any drives connected to said Raid Card. If anyone knows how to help that would be great. Thanks

 

Server Specs:

Dell PowerEdge R510

Intel Xeon E5640 (Just untill I get some new CPU's) 

8GB DDR3 ECC (Testing with ram I knew worked)

PERC H700 Raid Controller with 1GB cache.

Samsung 32Gb 3.1 USB boot drive.

240GB Kingston SSD (Caching maybe???? Or VM Storage Disk)

12, 1TB Seagate Constellation ES Drives. Only 3 Plugged for the moment.

[Jarsky]

26 minutes ago, FinnFixitMan said:

Due to not having the driver, FreeNAS is unable to detect any drives connected to said Raid Card. If anyone knows how to help that would be great. Thanks

 

How do you know the driver isn't installed? Have you checked what hardware is installed e.g pciconf -lv ?

are you sure it just isn't because your drives are unconfigured since its a RAID card?

 

Have you considered switching to an H200/H310 card in IT mode, since direct disk access is recommended for ZFS?

[Windows7ge]

This is a great example as to why you're not suppose to use a RAID card with FreeNAS/ZFS. You should really either flash the card to IT mode or buy an HBA.

[FinnFixitMan]

5 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

This is a great example as to why you're not suppose to use a RAID card with FreeNAS/ZFS. You should really either flash the card to IT mode or buy an HBA.

Yeah it probably is a good reason not to but it came with the server and if it doesnt work, it doesnt work. but thank you for the info.

[Windows7ge]

2 minutes ago, FinnFixitMan said:

Yeah it probably is a good reason not to but it came with the server and if it doesnt work, it doesnt work. but thank you for the info.

If you need something cheap look for a card like the Dell PERC H310. This can be bought second hand off eBay and they're not too hard to flash to IT mode. I've used them with ZFS (FreeNAS) and it works fine.

[FinnFixitMan]

2 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

If you need something cheap look for a card like the Dell PERC H310. This can be bought second hand off eBay and they're not too hard to flash to IT mode. I've used them with ZFS (FreeNAS) and it works fine.

lll have a look, thanks.

[Windows7ge]

1 minute ago, FinnFixitMan said:

lll have a look, thanks.

If you want something new that should last a good while I can also recommend the LSI 9207-8i. If you need more ports LSI 9201-16i.

[Jarsky]

13 hours ago, FinnFixitMan said:

Yeah it probably is a good reason not to but it came with the server and if it doesnt work, it doesnt work. but thank you for the info.

The H700 does work with FreeNAS/FreeBSD, but you have to use MPT utils to manage it, there is no MSM/MegaCLI for FreeBSD. But you dont really, and shouldnt, be using a RAID card with FreeNAS (except for some vary small cases where you can). 

 

The H700 specifically can't be flashed to IT mode, which is why I recommended getting a H200 or H310 (same card, but SAS slots are in different places), which can be flashed with P20 IT firmware. 

[Net Runner]

I second all that is said above. Just don't use the RAID controller with FreeNAS even if it works. I would recommend you replacing it with a pure HBA which you can get for around 10$-20$ off eBay and have the issue solved. If this is still not an option as an alternative you can install a hypervisor that supports your hardware (ESXi or Hyper-V or KVM) and runs FreeNAS as a virtual machine on top. Such kind of setup has many pros and cons which are out of the discussion but still a very viable option. I am running a similar setup on top of the DELL PowerEdge server with PERC having several virtual machines running side-by-side. FreeNAS is only one of them, works great so far.