I have an IBM M1015 MegaRAID SAS card which is equivalent to an LSI-9220-8i. I recently migrated to TrueNAS and the card appears when I do an lspci but none of the attached drives are appearing. I’ve used this same card for years in various Ubuntu versions, OpenIndiana, and OpenSolaris before that with no issues seeing the drives. The card was running and drives accessible in Ubuntu immediately before putting in place the drive I had installed TrueNAS on. Long way of saying I know it’s not an issue of bad hardware, it’s something within TrueNAS that is not seeing these drives.
The card is currently configured to pass the drives as JBODs. I know TrueNAS prefers the card flashed to IT mode, but my understanding is the drives should still be recognized in JBOD mode. Any suggestions we be much appreciated. Thanks.
TrueNAS has no opinions about running an LSI HBA card in RAID JBOD vs IT mode.
Indeed, ZFS has no opinions about this choice either - if it sees the disks, it will try to use them.
However as the person responsible for data integrity YOU should have significant concerns about JBOD vs IT mode, because ZFS assumes that your SATA controller works in a particular way, writing data in a specific sequence and in IT mode it works that way but in RAID JBOD it may well NOT work in that way and the consequence may well be corrupt data.
There are no shortage of posts here warning about RAID or JBOD mode, some relating to actual data corruption or even complete data loss, yet you appear to have decided that these warnings don’t apply to you and your system and although you probably could have flashed it to IT mode, you haven’t.
iX probably would have a view about RAID or JBOD modes - they are unsupported, which means that if you were paying iX for support, they might not provide it.
And I think you can guess what the response from other community members is going to be for community support, can’t you?
Do the work - flash the HBA to IT mode and come back if your disks still don’t appear.
I’m not sure if your response was intended to be belittling or not, however the condescending responses are just unnecessary.
I am aware of the differences of using the raid controller in JBOD vs IT mode. None of the data here is mission critical, it is purely for testing purposes and experimenting in my homelab. If I lose this data it is no great loss.
My question is purely for my own knowledge of how TrueNAS works vs other systems. Could I reflash the card to IT mode? Yes. That still doesn’t change the fact that the drives do not appear in TrueNAS at all in JBOD mode. What, if anything, is TrueNAS doing differently from other operating systems? I’ve certainly not encountered every possible scenario, but it is interesting to me that TrueNAS recognizes the card but nothing attached to it when multiple other systems do in the same hardware configuration. I would like to better understand those differences.
If anyone can provide insight into what TrueNAS is doing differently or looking for in this scenario I’d appreciate it.
No - they were not condescending. What is condescending IMO is someone who knows full well that they should have flashed their HBA to IT mode (because you explicitly said that) but hasn’t done so, and then when they have a problem knowing that they have an unsupported configuration, instead of flashing to IT mode to see if it fixes it and if not then asking for help now that they have a supported configuration, instead they decide to use the time of other volunteers to try to get their unsupported configuration working.
As to why RAID JBODs apparently appear on other people’s systems and not yours - I guess it’s a quirk specific to your unsupported hardware combinations.
My advice: Flash your HBA to IT mode and then come back if it is still not working.
Until you do that, I am not spending any more time helping you, and I advise others to do the same.
