Can you run trueNAS and RAID on a PCIe card with 6 SATA ports?

[AngelLV]

Hi!

Can you run trueNAS and RAID on a PC with a PCIe card with 6 SATA ports?

Thank you!

[tkitch]

If you're running TrueNAS - you do NOT want to run RAID.

 

TrueNAS does a better job of running a "RAID" setup than hardware raid does today.

[AngelLV]

36 minutes ago, tkitch said:

If you're running TrueNAS - you do NOT want to run RAID.

 

TrueNAS does a better job of running a "RAID" setup than hardware raid does today.

https://www.axagon.eu/en/produkty/pces-sa6 this is the one i am talking about.

[tkitch]

1 hour ago, AngelLV said:

https://www.axagon.eu/en/produkty/pces-sa6 this is the one i am talking about.

Doesn't change anything, you do NOT want to run RAID on SATA.  Let TrueNAS handle the array.

[Needfuldoer]

TrueNAS uses the ZFS file system, which you can think of like a more powerful, more flexible software RAID. In order to work its magic, it needs direct control over the drives. For that, you want an HBA (Host Bus Adapter), or a drive controller that can be put in "IT" mode. Those simply give you more drive ports to plug drives into, and hand those physical drives off to the OS.

 

RAID cards work by wrapping physical drives into a pool, then chopping that pool up into multiple virtual drives. The OS only ever sees those virtual drives; it's blind to the physical drives. If a physical drive goes bad, you have to rely on the RAID card's monitoring software to tell you.

[LIGISTX]

2 hours ago, AngelLV said:

Hi!

Can you run trueNAS and RAID on a PC with a PCIe card with 6 SATA ports?

Thank you!

As long as the PCIe card doesn’t try and do it’s own hardware RAID, yes. 
 

If that is a RAID card, as stated above, you don’t want that.

 

But as long as the PCIe device presents the drives directly to truenas like motherboard ports would, it would work fine. You set up the RAID array within truenas, ZFS is software RAID, and putting a RAID card between the drives and ZFS will just lead to issues, best case is annoyance, worst case is total data loss. 
 

This is why the advised solution is using an HBA. They can be found on eBay (at least in America) for cheap. Look for Dell h310, specifically flashed to IT mode: https://www.ebay.com/itm/133485835643?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=OwHu05S9RzG&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=B1xTkXm_Qfe&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

[airborne spoon]

avoid RAID cards for trunas. like in my system i have a SAS to SATA card that has 2x SAS ports that I've got 4x SATA cables coming out of to run all my drives and trunas controls the RAID portion, if i remember correctly I'm running RAID Z2

[m9x3mos]

3 hours ago, airborne spoon said:

avoid RAID cards for trunas. like in my system i have a SAS to SATA card that has 2x SAS ports that I've got 4x SATA cables coming out of to run all my drives and trunas controls the RAID portion, if i remember correctly I'm running RAID Z2

Agreed. You would want to use an hba like from lsi.

I use a lsi 9300-16i flashed to it mode and it runs great. I also had a 92xx-8i card forget the exact number also it mode and ran good as well. 

Getting over 1gbs reads and writes on the array of 8 spinning rust disks.