I’m looking to update my 12 year old diy NAS and had a few things I’m unsure about. It’s been sitting in my closet for years without use and I’m finally putting her back to work.
Current Hardware:
Asus P8H77-I Motherboard
Intel 2600k
(6) WD Red 3TB WD30EFRX
Ram 16gb
(2) 120gb SSD Truenas Scale
450w PSU via USB
I’m looking to move my OS SSDs off USB and add three more 3 TB harddrives.
Motherboard only has 6 SATA ports.
If I add an HBA, will this allow me to run all 9 HDDs off the x16 PCIe?
Then I can connect my SSDs directly to motherboard SATA and have 4 spare ports?
If so, can someone help me pick out an HBA that will work with my old hardware?
I’ve been watching Art of Server on YouTube trying to figure all this out.
Yes. Any HBA based on a LSI 2008 (9200), 2308 (9207), 3008 (9300) would do, though I would prefer a 2308 or newer.
Your PSU hower, is not sized for so many drives, and its age may be a concern.
Remember that you will need to make sure the HBA is flashed to IT firmware and not IR (IT == target mode, JBOD; IR == RAID mode, which you do NOT want with TrueNAS).
The LSI chips were used by many different vendors (many of whom just rebadged the LSI cards). You will need different cabling as SAS HBAs use multiple port SAS cables. The LSI SAS HBAs work with SATA drives just fine, in fact every SAS controller I have seen works fine with SATA drives. The opposite is not true, you cannot use SAS drives on SATA controllers. I use all SAS controllers these days as that lets me use SAS or SATA drives.
You should be able to find the LSI HBAs by searching eBay (even some NOS (new old stock) or open box), or any of a bunch of reputable used server parts companies. The naming convention is the base (9207) followed by number of ports internal or external. So a 9207-8i has 8 internal ports (on 2 connectors), while a 9207-8e has 8 external ports on 2 connectors. I use the 9207 as an example, the same holds true for other HBAs as well. Some even have both internal and external ports.
Avago/Broadcom/LSI has continued to support the cards by having documentation and downloads on line. Support Documents and Downloads remember to check the Include Legacy Products checkbox.
They used to have a page summarizing all the legacy HBAs, but I cannot find it right now.
Wrong. RAID controllers (“LSI MegaRAID”) should be avoided.
But a HBA with IR firmware is NOT a RAID controller: It is still a HBA, with hooks for basic RAID 0/1 functions, and essentially equivalent to IT for use with ZFS. See under 3) in the resource below.
The IR firmware is also fine but is a few percent slower. It is not clear there is any value to doing this as you would never want to use an IR virtual device with FreeNAS.
The article (and best practices for over a decade) makes it clear that you want to use IT mode and not IR mode. If you have an HBA (and not a MegaRAID card) why would you NOT want to run it with IT firmware?
The last time I touched the IR firmware (many, many years ago) you had to configure it to pass through the drives, adding a layer that gets you nothing. So why not flash to IT mode?
Note that I never said that IR mode turned the HBA into a RAID controller, just that it was operating in RAID mode instead of TARGET mode.
Read the resource carefully: A HBA on IR firmware is still a HBA. It passes the actual device to camcontrol, or the Linux equivalent. The advice is to “flash to IT/IR” (read “IT or IR”) is for controllers which may also have other firmwares (i.e. those less-advanced RAID controllers which may still be downgraded to plain HBA duties).
Granted, there’s no reason to flash a HBA for TrueNAS in IR mode rather than IT.
But there’s also no reason to scare people away from IR mode, as you did above. Per JGreco’s advice, if you have a HBA on the latest IR firmware you may actually leave it as it is, take a performance hit of “a few percent” and not even bother flashing to IT. (Although I agree that flashing to the latest IT would be best. But let not be Best be the enemy of Good.)
I had read it carefully. While you are focusing on one particular part of the post, I am focusing on a different part of the same post, specifically It is not clear there is any value to doing this as you would never want to use an IR virtual device with FreeNAS. and further explains We used to do this in the old days for boot devices, but with ZFS boot this may no longer relevant.. Prior to being able to boot from ZFS, you had a different filesystem for the boot device and would want that device on an HBA with IR firmware to provide mirroring.
I am not sure what is scary about the advice to flash an IR HBA to IT, as had been the recommended best practice for over a decade (when did that change, when did it become acceptable to use IR firmware with TrueNAS, with the SAS3 HBAs?). It adds one, fairly simple, step to the process of building a server. I also note that most of the HBAs on the used or new old stock market being sold for FreeNAS / TrueNAS use are already IT firmware (for as little as $25).
We should be recommending the best solutions, but I agree that we should also be acknowledging solutions that would work, but would not be the best. I did not do a very good of that above, and for that I apologize.
