Jbod not supported, suggested to use raid0 for each disk

TrueNAS General
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Hello, I just bought a large storage hardware (supermicro) that came with a avago LSI 3108 raid card.

Well as you can guess, it can’t see a hardware raid5 from that card, but the supermicro person said to put all drives into raid0 individually, and bingo all drives can now be seen by the truenas OS.

this is my very first truenas system, can anyone say if this is a setup that works reliably? which raid should I pick for the truenas pool? I don’t know much about the different Z options. I don’t know much at all in fact.

Does anyone see a problem with how this has been setup?

I was told to use raid0 for each drive individually because the raid card doesn’t support jbod, does that sound correct?

Any advice or input is greatly appreciated, and i’m really excited to start to use truenas going forward.

ike

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Absolutely not.

None.

No, it does not. The only correct answer is to replace the RAID card with a proper HBA.

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Hi Dan,
Great avatar! consider me a fan!

I’ve contacted the supermicro person who suggested this, and asked for a HBA alternative option.

I suppose it was too much to think they would know since they focus on servers via linux or microsoft mainly.

Does the HBA you suggest support JBOD? is that what i’m ultimately after for truenas to perform at it’s best?

thank you

ike

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See:

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Hit ebay or amazon, find an lsi 9311 or better flashed to IT mode, get one with cables, you’re good to go. You don’t want something obscuring the drives, just presenting them to the OS since we’re after software raid, not hardware.

How many drives you’re connecting should determine which LSI card you get. Some support 8 drives, some 16 and I don’t know what’s beyond that.

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hiya afrosheen,

so it’s 16 x 16TB drives and 2 ssd’s for OS

on a supermicro sas3 backplane

ike

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Time to play “match that LSA card”, let’s hit ebay for a second.

Found an internal with cables, 16 ports. Description is " LSI 9300-16i 12Gb/s SAS/SATA HBA IT Mode 16.00.12.00 TrueNAS UnRaid Cable Option". There are plenty more but these are known trusted cards, specifically mentioning HBA and IT mode.

Boot drives, in my opinion, belong to the motherboard sata ports and should stay there. Happy hunting!

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it appears to be a thing of great beauty!

I just need to verify the backplane connections with the supermicro guy, but this is amazingly affordable.

Thank you for your fast responses to both of you…and you saved my butt from having to pucker quite a bit!

ike

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If this is an expander backplane (which it likely is), you don’t need 16 lanes on the HBA; a single SAS cable will do the trick.

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That’s the nice thing about being downstream from the enterprise. Their stuff gets babied in 67 degree F datacenters and they’re basically new when they’re used. Just wait til you go 10g fiber. SFP’s, cards, cables and switches are way more affordable than you imagine.

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Pity 25G hasn’t gotten there yet, but…

Actually, the cards aren’t bad. Fiber isn’t any more expensive than for 10G. SFP28s are a little more, but not bad. But switches…

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The supermicro rep just sent me an email suggesting the LSI 9300-8i right after you did afrosheen…so maybe they’re getting some feedback from customers more than first thought.

Dan, I bet you’re right about the backplane as well, and if so it could be a pretty easy swap of the card.

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Probably the best of both worlds. Bandwidth and if you don’t need a 16-lane card to talk to the backplane you scale back to the 8-lane model. I imagine we’re not alone, the old forums were full of HBA LSI questions. I use one myself, just an 8x. I run 2 pools on it, one 5 drive, one 3 drive. Rock solid here.

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last update… presuming the card works as expected… The supermicro rep will allow me to RMA the raid card for the hba, decent of them and I appreciate that very much.

I even sent the link about why it matters to them and i think they are going to flash the card into IT mode for me…cool, but I suspect i can figure that out on my own if needed.

overall, great learning experience here!!! Thank you again to both of you who gave me insight and advice!

~ike

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Know you’ve already resolved this, but in case anyone gets here in the future, I have a Supermicro case with an LSI 3008 (just a little older than the 3108, but its really the same thing)

On boot, after the supermicro splash screen, you should see the Avago Card’s boot interface with a key to press to go into it’s configuration settings, and there should be an option for JBOD Mode.

Then Truenas should just see all the drives.

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Hi Sean,

Well since you brought it up… I thought I’d share my little adventure since my last post…

once i put an NVME drive on the motherboard, i could install the truenas os and when i rebooted…low and behold…it actually booted to the 2 SSD’s on the HBA that I had previously installed to! but when i removed the NVME, the machine could not find any bootable device…

So i used your post above to conclude this MUST be a bios setting issue…

So i did 3 things. 1. changed from UEFI to legacy. 2. turned on EFI (so i can see the option to press Ctrl-C to look at the HBA card’s settings) and 3. in the HBA card…i set the 2 ssd’s to first boot and the 2nd ssd to alternate boot…

Now after I did that, bingo-presto.

Note…before i did all that, i had downloaded the Truenas Scale version, and so installed that one…which had the exact same issues as Core.

That being said…i think i like Scale (community edition) a little better, can’t say why though.

It was able to import my previous array and when i added myself in as an SMB user i could browse and interact with the share perfectly. Even installed CLAM AV.

I’m brand new to this experience…i don’t even know if Scale requires a a license fee or subscription or if it’s free or not… just wanted to get something up and running and feel like it was working as intended.

I love hearing about anything anyone wants to share.

ike

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I’m not 100% sure of the specifics, but the LSI Board boots after the Motherboard BIOS. Its essentially its own little computer with its own BIOS (not really, but you can think of it that way).

So honestly, I would advise against trying to boot off of a drive attached to the HBA/LSI itself.

I’m not sure which Supermicro Chassis you have, but I have the SC829, and it has two 2.5" Drive slots on the rear, 4x 3.5" bays in the middle, and 12x 3.5" hot swap bays on the front.

The Front Bays are connected to the LSI Card, the Middle Plane is connected to the MOBO SAS interface (not the LSI SAS Interface), and the rear drives are connected to the MOBO SATA Interface.

Personally, I run TrueNAS Virtualized through a Hypervisor (XCP-NG for me, but Proxmox is a popular one), but the process should be similar, if you have similar options (IE, Drive availability not on the HBA).

What I did (and what I recommend) is using your Motherboard’s RAID Options to RAID1(Mirror) two drives NOT on the HBA/LSI interface (for me the two on the rear) to host your operating system (XCP-NG in my case, TrueNAS on yours)

( if you end up virtualizing truenas, this is the time where you would use PCI Passthrough to forward the LSI Card to the TrueNas VM)

Then once TrueNAS boots off of that, you just use your HBA/LSI stuff for dedicated storage drives.

TrueNAS does not require a license, and is free, for personal use.
I’ve only been in the server game for a couple years now, but it’s definitely been a fun experience.
Welcome to the community, and feel free to send me a message if you want to chat more about server setups

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It’s free, for any use, if you’re willing to accept the (slightly) limited features of the “community edition.” There are a handful of features that are enterprise-only; if you want those, you’ll need a license (which only comes with iX hardware). But it’s the features, not the use case, that determines whether you need a license.

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Hi Sean,

I read some articles on the risks of booting via HBA, so i certainly will change this setup. I was happy to find a solution to the boot process where i could at least see all the drives and it actually boot…the chassis i’m on, i think, is the 01-SC83654-xxq0c101 …at least that’s the number i see on the metal.

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Yup, the SC836. It’s basically the same thing as my 829.
Where I have 12 hot swaps up front and 4 on a mid plane (space limited cuz 2U chassis), you just have 16 hot swaps up front, with a 3U chassis.

It SHOULD have 2 hot swap 2.5" bays on the back, right underneath the power supplies.