Setting Up TrueNas on a Dell PowerEdge

[dylanthompson2]

I am trying to set up TrueNas Core on a Dell PowerEdge T330 but it says no drives are installed but I have 2 drives installed. There are no error messages and the drives both have green lights on them.

[Catsrules]

Are the drives plugged into a RAID card of some kind? Could be a driver issue. But also you may need to setup the drives on the RAID card configuration before they will be shown to the OS.

 

FYI TrueNAS (specifically ZFS filesystem) doesn't like RAID cards at all. It wants direct access to the drives. So you may need a different RAID card or configure it as a "JBOD" controller if is it supported.

 

 

 

[dylanthompson2]

5 minutes ago, Catsrules said:

Are the drives plugged into a RAID card of some kind? Could be a driver issue. But also you may need to setup the drives on the RAID card configuration before they will be shown to the OS.

 

FYI TrueNAS (specifically ZFS filesystem) doesn't like RAID cards at all. It wants direct access to the drives. So you may need a different RAID card or configure it as a "JBOD" controller if is it supported.

 

 

 

Yes they are connected to a RAID card.

Edited October 5, 2022 by dylanthompson2

[LIGISTX]

3 minutes ago, dylanthompson2 said:

Yes they are connected to a RAID card.

That’s no bueno. ZFS needs direct bare metal access to the drives to work properly. 
 

What RAID card? If it’s an LSI card, it can be flashed to IT mode which turns it into a HBA, which is what you want for ZFS. 

[dylanthompson2]

1 minute ago, LIGISTX said:

That’s no bueno. ZFS needs direct bare metal access to the drives to work properly. 
 

What RAID card? If it’s an LSI card, it can be flashed to IT mode which turns it into a HBA, which is what you want for ZFS. 

 

[LIGISTX]

13 minutes ago, dylanthompson2 said:

 

First result was this, but possibly poke around more just to make sure there is no contradicting info:

 

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/flash-crossflash-dell-h330-raid-card-to-hba330-12gbps-hba-it-firmware.25498/

[dylanthompson2]

5 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

First result was this, but possibly poke around more just to make sure there is no contradicting info:

 

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/flash-crossflash-dell-h330-raid-card-to-hba330-12gbps-hba-it-firmware.25498/

Ok I will try this.

[Hotloads]

I built a Dell R410 and R820 for CHIA coin which involves chaining multiple raid controllers flashed to IT mode so that I could add 16+ drives to the servers.

 

The YouTube channel ArtofServer has multiple videos that detail how to change out the stock raid controllers on the r410, r720, r820 and others. The videos also walk through how to flash the controllers. If you don't want to manually flash he sells raid controllers on eBay that are already flashed to IT mode.

 

These generation of servers and the RAM are dirt cheap and great for anyone looking to start a rack a home.

[Needfuldoer]

Put the PERC H330 into HBA mode. Once you do that, TrueNAS will be able to see the physical drives directly.

 

That's how I have TrueNAS set up on my R730.