*** This is for HOME USE. Very, very limited budget, so please don’t suggest things that are thousands of dollars. I am working with what I have available.
Windows 11 Pro machine
Looking for help to see if I can cross flash the eeprom of a Sun Oracle MegaRAID 9361-8i to LSI or something.
I have two of the cards, one running RAID 5, the other RAID 6 (the important one). I have a couple of 9260-8i and a 9266-8i from before. Before, I was able to have a RAID (5 or 6) and buy a new matching hard drive and add it to the existing array without having to rebuild a new RAID or anything. It took a couple of days, but the RAID was still accessable during the whole time. I got the new RAID cards with the same idea in mind - to add another hard drive later on when I could afford it. The RAID 6 has five Seagate SkyHawk AI 20TB drives in it. It got full (it runs my Plex server with all my movies digitized in REMUX). I picked up a new drive, went to add it, and it won’t let me. Through talking with LSI tech support, they told me it’s an OEM model by Sun Oracle, who are known to cut out regular functionality. So, now I’m stuck trying to figure out how to move forward. My cousin suggested I might be able to cross flash the eeprom to get that functionality back. Slightly worried about if it would be able to work with the foreign configuration, but I’m hoping same chip, it should work.
No, I do not have any way of backing anything up. It’s for home use, so a tape drive would be a lot of money for something I’d rarely use (and shouldn’t need if this card did what I wanted)
Other idea is to try and back up as much as possible to the other RAID, take the new 20TB, and take two off of the RAID 6, create a new RAID 5, move the rest of the files over from the RAID 6, and when that’s done, add the drives from the RAID 6 one at a time. Very, very risky, and I don’t even know if the Sun Oracle card lets me add to RAID 5, too. So, side note to that one would be to possibly buy another RAID card, one that does support adding to arrays, and do the same thing, building the new array with the new RAID card, etc. But, as I said, huge risk taking two drives off of the RAID 6 to proceed.
I forgot to add, the possibility of getting another RAID card, a 9361 or newer, and trying to import the foreign configuration and going up from there, too. Again, really risky.
You didn’t post a detailed hardware, OS and VDEV/pool description.
RAID cards aren’t used with ZFS since it wants and needs direct access to the drives.
I didn’t think any of that was needed for what I asked for specifically. Especially since I said RAID 5 and 6, so I’m not sure why you’re mentioning ZFS. The only hardware applicable is Sun Oracle OEM version of LSI MegaRAID 9361-8i. Firmware version 4.680.00-8577. Can the eeproms of these cards be flashed to be able to let me add hard drives to existing RAID 5 or 6?
You are posting to a TrueNAS specific forurm. You did not state that clearly.
We don’t even know what OS you are running to attempt to give you any instruction or run commands.
You might try posting at Servethehome forum too
Done and done, thanks. 