Expanding my FreeNAS Box

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MattGG

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Aug 19, 2010
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Hello, I have a freenas box that I've been using as home storage for many months and am nearing its max capacity. I'm getting ready to buy more drives, as prices come back down, to give me some more space. Currently my set up is:

mobo: GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3
cpu: core i7 2600 (overkill I know but I just got it, see below)
ram: 16gb ddr3
hdd's: 6x 2tb seagate green raidz1

This has been my frist experience with raid of any sort. The drives plug straight to the motherboard via sata. After much research I find that if I want to have many more drives I should go the SAS route using the SFF-8087 cables. This means buying a SAS/Sata controller for a few hundred dollars and later on a SAS expander. At first I didn't realize that ZFS implies software raid and I was looking at some very expensive raid cards that will do raid 5. Now I'm wondering if the card needs to support raid at all. My question is, should I buy a more expensive card or save money because ZFS handles the raid?

FYI, I've been toying around with ESXi 5 and would very much like to virtualize FreeNAS, hense the core i7.
 
Disclaimer: I have only test FreeNAS in a VMware environment, please take my suggestions with a grain of salt and ensure that you have secondary backups before doing anything that may endanger your data.

A JBOD controller is all that is necessary with ZFS since you will need to present the disks to the O/S individually to place them into a ZFS array. Don't worry about getting an expensive RAID card.

FreeBSD is relatively lightweight and handles well in a virtual environment, I would still apply the rule of 1GB RAM per TB but giving the VM one vCpu will be adequate for FreeBSD in a virtual environment.
 
As l3thal6 said, you don't need a RAID card for ZFS and FreeNAS. Any storage controller capable of JBOD will work just fine. I recommend grabbing the IBM M1015 off eBay as that controller is fairly cheap, supports a lot of newer/larger sized drives, has relatively high performance, and is just plain solid.

A few guides for it:
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-m1015-part-1-started-lsi-92208i/
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-2-performance-lsi-92208i/
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-3-smart-passthrough-lsi-92208i/
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
 
I have to say I'm surprised at how much cheaper those are, thanks for your recommendation. I noticed, though, that it supports up to 16 SAS/Sata devices. Does that mean that even with a SAS expander it would not recognize past 16 hdd's? If so, If I later got a second m1015 would that allow support for 32 devices?

Also, forgive my ignorance, but would I still be able to use the on board sata ports on the mobo in combination with the card?
 
MattGG said:
I have to say I'm surprised at how much cheaper those are, thanks for your recommendation. I noticed, though, that it supports up to 16 SAS/Sata devices. Does that mean that even with a SAS expander it would not recognize past 16 hdd's? If so, If I later got a second m1015 would that allow support for 32 devices?
Click to expand...
Hmmm odd. According to this document, the M1015 supports up to 32 drives, not 16:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/73268984/4/ServeRAID-M1015-SAS-SATA-Controller

MattGG said:
Also, forgive my ignorance, but would I still be able to use the on board sata ports on the mobo in combination with the card?
Click to expand...
Yes
 
I wouldn't use SATA drives behind a SAS expander - Nex7 has a good writeup here in another thread on it - but suffice to say there are plenty of issues. If you aren't PCIe slot limited you can add M1015's for however many drives you need - if you are LSI has a 16 port hba.
 
I'm in the minority for home users, but I went with the LSI 9201-16i. 16 drives, single card, non-RAID. The other 4 drives in my 20 bay enclosure are pulled from onboard SATA.
 
adi said:
I'm in the minority for home users, but I went with the LSI 9201-16i. 16 drives, single card, non-RAID. The other 4 drives in my 20 bay enclosure are pulled from onboard SATA.
Click to expand...

Hi. Just hoping to confirm, you're running freenas with an LSI 9201-16i without issue?

Been playing with freenas on a RocketRAID 2320 I had lying around, but have been looking for a decent 16 port card that will work in freenas & unraid (still haven't committed to an OS) and slowly driving myself crazy in the process.

Doesn't seem like there are many 16 channel cards with native support in freenas.

16 ports is attractive, because I could always just chuck the thing in a pci-e slot in the htpc and try out flexraid while leaving the other pci-e slot for a decent video card.
 
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