Hello,
What is the best SAS HBA card to use with TrueNasCore to support
4 x 24 Bay Jbods running U.2 SSD drives? Will one card be a bad idea or I need two cards?
Thank you,
It was already recommended for you to seek professional help in your other thread. Your setup and requirements are complex
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We’ve built hundreds of Linux NAS servers, workstations, etc., over the past 25 years. We don’t want to go the Synology route, and TrueNAS seems like a great option since the clients wants to add more storage without experiencing too much downtime.
I’ve read your reply a few times and I honestly don’t see how it relates to @SmallBarky’s post at all.
Synology literally doesn’t come up in that thread even once.
If you can’t even compute the theoretical performance issues with what you asked, you need to seek out professional help and support. The entire package needs to be sized and speced correctly. You should reach out to iX Systems or see if there is anyone qualified in your area.
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Exactly, this appears to be a $75k+ setup for the drives alone.
Skimping out by not getting professional build advice seems ill advised.
We currently have all 15TB 70+ drives in a 24-bay 12G SAS setup with an LSI RAID card, and multiple volumes are shared over Samba. The Linux server has a 100G network card connected to a 100G switch, with clients connected over 25G. Everything is working great, and we’re getting speeds of 2,000 MB/s over the 25G connections to the clients. As I mentioned before, instead of adding additional volumes and sharing them out, the TrueNAS approach of growing the volume is the way to go.
And not to mention, I have all the data being rsynced daily to a TrueNAS Core system I built with a 90-bay JBOD. Everything has been working great for over a year, and I even successfully grew the volume once.
So you have much of the hardware already, but you want to make changes.
Not sure why you need two threads.
Anyway, can’t you just get another one of those “LSI RAID cards” that work great for you right now?
I’m trying not to be triggered by your usage of the word RAID and just say that, as per the official recommendation: If you’re using a controller, use an HBA. Do not use hardware RAID. One set to “JBOD”-personality may or may not work as you expect, ymmv.
A system integrator would be able to tell you this. So would the hardware guides.
We are trying to move away from using a RAID card and instead go with an HBA to avoid relying on LSI/Broadcom command scripts for growing the volume, as well as eliminating the need to back up data every time we want to add more space. Moving 840TB of data isn’t easy and takes significant time. My concern is whether TrueNAS Core will be suitable for this project.
The plan involves building a temporary server/storage setup, moving the data over, replacing the 24 bays with new 24-bay units, and then replacing the Linux server with a new server built on TrueNAS Core. The idea is to utilize the drives—likely multiple 12 drives in a RAID-Z configuration—to create one large pool and then copy all the data back to it. I will review the links you provided.
Hopefully it makes sense as to what i am trying to accomplish…
Okay. I’m going to bow out.
I don’t feel comfortable giving what boils down to community advice when the stakes are $100k+ (in just hardware alone) in an enterprise setting.
Good luck.
Just checked out the link regarding fake goods. Yes, we’ve been burned before. We got LSI cards that looked identical but, after confirming with Broadcom support, the serial numbers didn’t match their database. The cards looked identical to the originals.
+1 on purchasing a tested solution from iX if this is a business environment.
The card you are looking for is a Tri-Mode adapter, assuming your JBODs have SAS interconnects. Do you have the spec sheet or model for the shelves you are using? You said U.2, so I’m assuming you have NVME drives rather than SAS?
https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/BC-0510EN
You may also have to consider moving to SCALE, as I’m not sure how well tested Tri-Mode adapters are in FreeBSD. I can say that I’ve used a 9500-8e with regular SAS shelves on SCALE without issue, but I have no experience with using them in CORE with NVME. I suspect that in CORE you’d have some struggles, given that even in Linux there are struggles. Broadcom while having the best tech here is still definitely quirky.
This thread has alot of information on the quirks in the territory you are treading in.
The drives mentioned in the other post (SAMSUNG MZ-ILS15T0 PM1633a) use a SAS interface, not U.2. These are presumably the 70 drives they already have.
It’s unclear where U.2 enters the picture. Maybe in an additional purchase of new drives, one that has nothiing to do with any currently owned hardware. If so that’s another couple of $100k’s.
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That is indeed a SAS drive if true.
The U.2 connector does look physically similar to SAS. Perhaps some confusion on OPs part.
I would be using this unit to connect to an HBA
I see you mentioned SCALE, but how does it perform with Samba shares? From what I’ve read online, Core has the best Samba performance.
That is incorrect. U.2 is a CONNECTOR that is designed for PCIE NVME drives while providing backwards compatibility for SAS.
The ESM (or IOM) in the shelf there is listed as having mini SAS HD ports, so in theory should work with the 9500 card I linked above.
yes, you are correct. I mixed up with another drive…