Server RAID setup

[Houston2222]

I Just received a Avamar ADS Gen 3 Server.

I want to set it up with Nas4Free or FreeNas and am able to install and use the GUI like normal but am unable to add the Hard drives Separately. It shows up as one disk

with no stats or Information. The Raid controller is a Dell PERC 6I PCI-E Controller and I have 6 1TB Drives.

I really want to set this up as soon as I can and have very little free time to work on this. Any help is appreciated.

Thank you

[leadeater]

You need to go in to the RAID card bios during boot and set the disks to JBOD mode or create a single disk RAID 0 array for each disk.

[Houston2222]

Thank you,

I am stuck trying to figure out how to change the RAID level though, I wanted to try that earlier. Do you have any ideas?

 

[FAQBytes]

To expand on leadeater's post, RAID cards will appear to be a single disk to anything that is not the card. 

 

Think of it like PCI-E SSDs- it's a bunch of flash chips that work together as one drive. RAID cards do the same thing, just on a more macro level. 

 

You can use the RAID card as a passthrough using JBOD (Just-a-bunch-of-disks) mode, which will show all the individual drives. Almost all modern RAID cards support this functionality. 

 

In order to access the card's BIOS, look at the manual (some will have it on screen), and during the RAID card initialization press the hotkeys for your card. In the card's BIOS, it should look very similar to how a motherboard bios, just with fewer options. There should be something similar to "Operating Mode", where it should say RAID, then the level. In this menu there should be an option for JBOD. Use this as passthrough. 

 

This is unless you want it to run in a RAID function.

[Houston2222]

Thank You for the Reply, I will be right back I'm testing this out.

[Houston2222]

I am unable to change the RAID level at all on the Controller but I can add and remove discs, and ideas?

 

[Houston2222]

Thank you all for the reply's I got it up and running like I needed,

Thank you.

[FAQBytes]

4 minutes ago, Houston2222 said:

I am unable to change the RAID level at all on the Controller but I can add and remove discs, and ideas?

 

Did a little research. Turns out that this is one of the cards that does not support JBOD out of the box. Unless you want to go flashing custom firmware, you can get around this by assigning each disk to its own RAID 0 array. 

 

In the end you should have 6 raid 0 arrays with 1 disk each. 

 

EDIT: Glad you got it working.

[Houston2222]

At least I thought I did.....

When I Enter Nas4Free, it still shows up as one disk, is that normal? And how do I know if the RAID 0 is working?

 

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Houston2222 said:

At least I thought I did.....

When I Enter Nas4Free, it still shows up as one disk, is that normal? And how do I know if the RAID 0 is working?

 

Did you add all the disks to the same RAID 0 array? You'll need to create 6 different arrays containing only a single disk.

[Houston2222]

That's what I though, But when I tried that it said no configurable disk's.

 

[leadeater]

20 minutes ago, Houston2222 said:

That's what I though, But when I tried that it said no configurable disk's.

 

Delete all existing arrays and make sure you are starting from a clean slate with 6 unconfigured disks.

[leadeater]

However I do have a question, is there a cable coming off the RAID card that goes to a battery? If the answer is yes you'll actually get better performance using the RAID features of the card and configuring a RAID 5 array than using NAS4Free or FreeNAS.

 

You can still use NAS4Free or FreeNAS using the single visible disk it will see doing that but they will only be managing the shares etc and not the disks themselves.

[Houston2222]

Yes there is a cable and it goes to a Bios and Controller Battery. Will the controller automatically do the RAID if I set it up with Nas4Free. Instead of software RAID? 

Thank you very much

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, Houston2222 said:

Yes there is a cable and it goes to a Bios and Controller Battery. Will the controller automatically do the RAID if I set it up with Nas4Free. Instead of software RAID? 

Thank you very much

Normally you have two choices:

• Cheap HBA/RAID card and use software RAID i.e. FreeNAS
• Expensive RAID card with battery

Since you have option 2 you can setup a RAID 5 array in the RAID card bios and it will perform very well. You can then use that RAID 5 array with basically anything including FreeNAS, OS cannot tell it's a RAID volume (well it sorta can but doesn't care).

 

Usually when your using NAS4Free or FreeNAS option 1 is the much preferred method, using multiple RAID arrays and then software RAIDing them using FreeNAS is advised against since it interferes with FreeNAS's ability to monitor disk health.

 

Just to make it clear you can use a hardware RAID array with NAS4Free/FreeNAS but do not use any of their software RAID features, just create shares on the hardware RAID volumes.