My Truenas Scale (Dragonfish-24.04.1.1) is running on a Dell PowerEdge R610. I would like to add a card to it to run some external SATA hard drives. I picked SATA because I have a plethora of drives that I obtained. That said, I know the R610 has 2 open PCIe 2.0 slots. However, I am a little confused by the different HBA cards and the need to put it in “IT mode”. Can anyone help me decipher this and make recommendations as to what card to buy?
Perform a Google (or the engine of your choice) for something like “truenas hba hardware” and “truenas hba flash”. You should find a lot of postings. Have a read and you are apt to find something you will be happy with. If you add “r610” as well, you will find postings for that as well.
Good hunting.
Generally, people recommend the most by far LSI HBAs. They do need flashed to IT mode, and, that is addressed in various FAQS and posts in the forums. IT mode, think of it as non RAID mode as ZFS does not like RAID controllers.