Dell poweredge t310 with truenas

[Cammy]

Hello, i am thinking about picking up a dell poweredge T310. Though it has a raid card in it but i want to use TRUENAS core and i understand this wont work because it uses zfs as its file struture. the T310 has backplane which i think has a mini sas connector comming off for data could i buy a mini sas to sata cable and plug in to the SATA ports on the motherbored and it would work all fine and jolly?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/LSI-6Gbps-SAS-HBA-LSI-9240-8i-9211-8I-IT-Mode-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID-2-Cable-/133410484262?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49292

or should a get this? or what do people recommend?

[Windows7ge]

To my knowledge if you want to do SAS backplane to SATA on the motherboard you need specifically a Reverse SFF-8087 breakout cable. The Forward variant is only for HBA/RAID card to drives.

 

Honestly though I'd check if the card supports JBOD mode, you could also flash it ti IT mode or just buy a cheap HBA.

[Cammy]

10 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

To my knowledge if you want to do SAS backplane to SATA on the motherboard you need specifically a Reverse SFF-8087 breakout cable. The Forward variant is only for HBA/RAID card to drives.

 

Honestly though I'd check if the card supports JBOD mode, you could also flash it ti IT mode or just buy a cheap HBA.

Could you possibly put a example of one that would work, this is getting very confusing....

[Windows7ge]

31 minutes ago, Cammy said:

Could you possibly put a example of one that would work, this is getting very confusing....

Cable or HBA?

 

I've personally not tested or validated the necessity of Reverse breakout cables but it's what I've been told is necessary. Will be testing this myself in due time though.

 

For an HBA I'm quite partial to the LSI 9207-8i. Not expensive. Works flawlessly with ZFS from my experience.

[Cammy]

5 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Cable or HBA?

 

I've personally not tested or validated the necessity of Reverse breakout cables but it's what I've been told is necessary. Will be testing this myself in due time though.

 

For an HBA I'm quite partial to the LSI 9207-8i. Not expensive. Works flawlessly with ZFS from my experience.

with the hba you mentioned would it be as simple as buying one putting it in a pcie slot and unplugging the mini sas cables going to the raid card and plug them into the hba and all the drives would show up and I would be able to use zfs?

[BloodKnight7]

Your T310 should support passthrough mode which would present the hard drives (4 if I remember correctly) to true nas for its use with zfs.

[Cammy]

14 minutes ago, BloodKnight7 said:

Your T310 should support passthrough mode which would present the hard drives (4 if I remember correctly) to true nas for its use with zfs.

@BloodKnight7Are you sure, because everything I have seen says otherwise but if this is the case it would be so good.

[BloodKnight7]

7 minutes ago, Cammy said:

@BloodKnight7Are you sure, because everything I have seen says otherwise but if this is the case it would be so good.

Well... thats why you put the card in passthrough mode, so the OS will see the drives as independent drives. What card did your T310 came with? if you do a quick google search of the models you can very easily find out if those support passthrough mode or not.

[Cammy]

8 minutes ago, BloodKnight7 said:

Well... thats why you put the card in passthrough mode, so the OS will see the drives as independent drives. What card did your T310 came with? if you do a quick google search of the models you can very easily find out if those support passthrough mode or not.

see I have not bought one yet there is a few listed on ebay I will ask the sellers for the raid card that in it. I take it google how to put the raid card in passthrough mode is a simple google? it seems to be the H700 card

[BloodKnight7]

3 minutes ago, Cammy said:

see I have not bought one yet there is a few listed on ebay I will ask the sellers for the raid card that in it. I take it google how to put the raid card in passthrough mode is a simple google?

That would be correct my friend. Most of the PERC cards support passthrough mode if I remember correctly. 

[Cammy]

13 minutes ago, BloodKnight7 said:

That would be correct my friend. Most of the PERC cards support passthrough mode if I remember correctly. 

Some articles seem to be going back and form between yes you can do it and no you can't some are saying enabling JBOD (don't know what that is yet) and it works. is there any material that you would suggest looking at I.e forms, posts etc

[BloodKnight7]

JBOD and passthrough are for this intended purpose the same thing. Um.. I dont know specifically what resources I could point you to, Im just sharing my experience... I just checked the hardware I have available home (All Dell PowerEdge) and I can tell you that Dell SAS 5/iR, Dell SAS 6/iR,  Dell H200 support passthrough/jbod mode.

 

If your card does not support passthrough/jbod like the H310 or the H710 you could try to flash it to IT mode...although doing that would generate some firmware errors... if you cant get a passthrough/jbod capable card, another alternative would be to present all your physical drives as RAID 0, the problem with this would be that is that ZFS wants full control of the drive which cant happen when a RAID controller has control of it in a RAID0. So if you have you start having S.M.A.R.T errors ZFS will never know. So you'll never get the warnings then have a drive fail and never know why. But I have ran this way before, no big deal as long as you keep your hardware monitoring through iDRAC enabled.

[Windows7ge]

3 hours ago, Cammy said:

with the hba you mentioned would it be as simple as buying one putting it in a pcie slot and unplugging the mini sas cables going to the raid card and plug them into the hba and all the drives would show up and I would be able to use zfs?

Yep.

 

52 minutes ago, Cammy said:

some are saying enabling JBOD (don't know what that is yet)

JBOD or Just a Bunch Of Disks today means no RAID setup on the controller. The disks are independently presented to the OS in the fullest (what you want for ZFS).

 

Back in "the day" JBOD had a different meaning but we won't go into that here.