Hello everyone, newbie here!

TrueNAS General
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Hey everyone newbie here, getting into the TrueNAS family, been wondering if a few things. I have been doing some reading to get familiar with the terms and I believe I have a glimpse of what to ask now.

I recently acquired a 9361-8i MegaRAID card, I was doing some reading that RAID cards are not recommended for truenas since they cannot be flashed into “IT mode”.

I read some more reason forums and since truenas moved from bsd to linux in SCALE, it seems linux is more friendly with drivers etc and with more components and RAID cards are one of them.

I did some research on this card and it seems it can be put into something called JBOD, which it seems it can pass the drives directly to the OS just like a regular HBA card

google this to go the broadcom link if interested:
[MegaRAID, 3ware, and HBA Support for Various RAID Levels and JBOD Mode]

My setup would be the following:

-AM4 mobo with a 2700x CPU
-64-80gb of DDR4 RAM
-8+ 2.5 SSD’s with 3.8TB each
-running ESXI 8.0 u3 OS
-Dual 10G broadcom nic, but my network stack is limited to 1G

My question would be, if I put this card into JBOD (will have to research how to do that) would this card essentially work with TrueNAS SCALE latest version 25.04.0?

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Forgot to add I would have to use SFF-8643 connectors to SATA

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No. It isn’t a driver problem; it’s a “ZFS needs direct access to drives” problem. RAID cards are no more suitable for ZFS under Linux than for ZFS under FreeBSD (which is to say, not at all).
See:

2 Likes
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I see, I guess I will have to scratch this, would a 9305-16i suffice? seems to be the newer card compared to the 9300-16i?

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It should be fine.

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Why virtualized ?
Truenas now supports Docker, VMs and Containers…

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This system will also host other VM’s

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“Supports,” experimentally (except for Docker, which is supposedly production-ready), and its VM features have never been worth significant use.

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I agree, but VMs do work (and are performant enough) for home use.

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Yes. Or a plain 9300-8i, optionally with an expander (e.g. AEC-82885T).