I have TrueNAS Core installed on a Dell PE R7615 server but it’s not recognizing the three onboard NvME drives. The PERC H965i Card does not support an HBA personality type but the drives are configured for use in non-RAID mode (recommended for vSAN mode). Dell support has suggested experimenting with the SATA settings (AHCI, RAID, and Off) but none of them make a difference.
I have run out of ideas and I am not really sure what else to try. I am hoping someone else here has some experience with this product and can offer some helpful guidance.
Very likely to be a problem, I don’t think TrueNAS Core even has a driver for those things.
Not sure what the support people were expecting, because that was highly unlikely to do much of anything.
Really, the only useful setup with NVMe is to ditch all the tri-mode crap and connect everything directly to PCIe. What version of the R7615 do you have, i.e. what and how many drive bays?
Thank you for your response. When working with the sales agent on the configuration I had asked for an HBA and failed to review the final specs prior to order/delivery - thats my fault.
Not sure which model exactly the R7615 us but it has 7 SFF drive bays in the front. I believe that this is the HBA that the build should have shipped with: HBA465i Front
I already have an email into my sales rep to see about a swap out.
Ask them for the “S160_NVME” storage controller config (i.e. SATA+PCIe for the 2.5" bays). Sadly, the manual no longer seems to have cabling diagrams for the backplanes, like the older generations did.
OK I had my eye on the HBA465i Front card. Why the S160_NVME instead of the HBA? I quickly glanced at the S160 specs and it looks like it aggregates drives into software RAID sets, unless that feature can be disabled?
About the drive bays you are probably correct with the count. Not sure how I arrived at 7, lol. Weirdly I cannot find actual drive bay count anywhere in iDrac or on the product support page (where Dell used to provide that info).
No clue on the particular driver, but scale is free so you can test & see if it works. As long as you don’t update your pools you can always roll back (not sure if scale and core as in sync for zfs versions). Zfs pools aren’t auto updated, but can be manually updated from the gui if you decide to stick to scale.
PERC H965i uses SAS 4116 Chip, which requires mpi3mr driver.
PERC H965i is Tri-Mode Adapters, but this will convert the nvme device into a sas device and there will be considerable performance loss.
You need to contact your device vendor to modify the device configuration to the option of directly connecting the nvme backplane to the CPU.
Point taken, I will push for the native NvME controller. I am not sure why Dell would sell me NvME drives and turn around and outfit a Tri-Mode adapter.
