HPE DL380 G7 TrueNas Scale

Hi everyone,
I am completely new to enterprise devices and raid controllers. I understand how raid works and stuff, but need help setting up TrueNas Scale on my server. I have a logical drive created with the OS installed and I can get it to boot up. I didn’t know if it was better to have the OS take care of all the raid config or if I should do that in the hardware raid controller. I am also not even sure if mine supports HBA/passthrough mode. Any advice on this would greatly help me out.

If you check you will find 100’s of messages saying RAID and truenas are a bad mix. Look on github for hpsahba, it can enable HBA IT mode on some HP controllers. If this works you will need a pcie controller to run your boot drive.

Truenas is not just a nice GUI to set up a network share.

It uses ZFS to protect your data on multiple levels. ZFS needs direct hardware access to your drives to do its magic and that is not possible if you present it with a hardware raid volume. Worse even, it can lead to complete data loss.

So find out if the controller can be flashed to IT mode. Just choosing “JBOD or HBA” mode is not the same. It needs to be flashed.

If thats not possible, get a LSI SAS HBA from ebay.

Most users are knowledgeable about, …everything I’d say.
Haven’t seen a psychic here in the forum that would accurately guess your hardware. Therefore, 1st thing you need to share, to get proper aid, is all aspects of your hardware. Not to the point of RAM architecture but, ECC or not, motherboard, cards plugged in, etc.

Fund this link about your hardware: HPE ProLiant DL380 G7 Server - Overview

That’s it. Is all I know. Am new here too.
Cheers

You can find quite a lot of information at Uncle Fester’s Basic TrueNAS Configuration Guide[1][2].

[1] Credit to @dan for having conserved and enhanced this for some years.

[2] Disclosure: I wrote quite a bit of the newer stuff (before I ran out of time).

Hi everyone,
Thanks for the replies. Based on @Farout’s point about the need to flash the controller regardless, I’m planning to buy a new one since mine is integrated into my motherboard. My apologies, @argumentum—I should have included more details in my original post, especially since this isn’t my first time posting.
My specs:
HPE DL380 G7
CPU: Dual intel Xeon E5630 @2.53GHz
Ram: Advanced ECC
I plan on buying this LSI SAS 9211-8i off Amazon which looks like it is already in IT Mode:

Thoughts?

2 Likes

never mind. I said it because users ask for more detail before brainstorming a solution.

I found myself buying a 24 HDD case. Then a 24i. Compared to CPUs, a bunch of HDDs use a whole lot more watts than the CPU itself at idle.
I still have to merge my other PCs to this one. But enough about me :slight_smile:
Think of the future. It may make sense getting a 24i instead of a 8i, or not.