I’ve migrated through three different SAS controllers in the course of setting up this system. Each time there has been no real issue with the new controller finding all of the drives and everything coming back to “normal”.
After most recent switch to an LSI-9400-16i I’ve noticed that the drive names went from being a three char sd[a-v] to a mix of three char device names and 4 char device names. Screenshot below shows situation in one of the two pools where this is happening. The second pool, where this naming has stayed consistently three char is a 6x2 Mirror. As you can see in the pool that I have screenshotted, this is a RAIDZ2 pool.
Is this something to be concerned about or is this to be expected. Is there a way to refresh this view as some of the drive icons in the UI are present and others aren’t. Not sure what TrueNAS is seeing differently about some of these devices. They are all identical.
The labels /dev/sd[xx] move around on upgrade or with disk addition and removal (there may be more cases but none are coming to mind), but TrueNAS uses PARTUUID to keep track of them (which you can view with blkid and compare to zpool status). After 26 have been used, /dev/sda through /dev/sdz, it will move over to /dev/sdaa through /dev/sdaz and so on. This shouldn’t pose any sort of operational problem.
No idea why the icons aren’t showing in some cases, I’d consider raising that as a bug (if you’re on Dragonfish it’s the smiling face in the top right corner).
Aside from some odd labelling and an icon not showing, has TrueNAS alerted about any disk issues or similar? Or have you seen any odd behavior outside of this?
Interesting question… Showing drives in “JBOD” mode which I am assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that we are running as HBA… Any hints with this controller welcome.
No alerts regarding any pool problems. I did kick of a scrub just in case that would force a refresh on some of this info. As a further example of what I am seeing, the sdh drive in this pool shows no drive info and is the one missing the icon…
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the modes RAID, JBOD and HBA?
JBOD being RAID but presented as single disks?
If so, I’m not touching that with a 10-foot pole, I’m don’t feel confident enough to give further advice if that’s the case, other than to make sure you have a working and tested backup.
So the set personality command fails and tells me command not supported.
Any other ideas as to how to get this 9400 in HBA mode? I’ve read through some of the cross flash threads and don’t really feel it applies here as it seems the firmware provided by Broadcom is for an HBA controller…
This is flashed to latest firmware available from Broadcom. Previous version was 17.00.00.00.00 which I agree looks suspect.
I found mention on STH site regarding same issue of changing personality… Some older posts claiming if mpt3sas driver gets loaded, you are in IT mode which doesn’t seem to be the case.
I dropped back to a 9305 controller that I had and the device naming reverted to an expected three char name (given I have less than 24 drives). I’ve run scrubs on each of my pools and have made other adjustments, moving disks from one pool to another. Everything seems to be intact…
