Very new to self hosting and truenas.
Got an old dell with 6x4tb of storage. Turns out they are all SAS drives and turns out hardware raid is the old thing now. Knowing none of this before what can I do with SAS drives connecting to my raid card (in photo) knowing that this is just a home NAS, SAS drives are more expensive and better to just go SATA.
What do you think?
Get a pcie to data, sell all the SAS drives and save up for 6x4tb of Seagate data drives?
What would you do with a dell server with old SAS drives if the end goal was a dependable home NAS for important home files?
I’m new to this so any input helps, thanks!
Get a SAS card that is in IT mode, use the SAS cables until your drives die, then buy SAS to SATA cables. Problem solved.
The SAS cables go in pairs of 4…
If one dies I have to replace 4… And the raid HDD builder won’t be able to build more that 1 at a time probably?
Unless you were suggesting something else
SAS drives tends to be top quality server stuff… I would keep them until the break then replace with cheaper sata.
Unless you need something less power hungry (SSSs?) or less noisy.
Also keep the hardware raid, why not. You should be able to remove the raid inside its bios and see the four disks individually.
It is fine as long as you are just passing the disks directly to the OS. Do not use hardware raid for data storage.
Hardware raid is fine as long as you can still get the same hardware RAID card or Motherboard.
This is a PERC H700 which does not support IT mode (even if you cross-flash to an LSI firmware).
You could use that card as-is but for truenas I’d suggest grabbing a proper SAS card. I got one off ebay (LSI 9207) for about USD$35 already flashed and ready to go.
Do you recommend SAS over SATA? What would I do of I wanted to move to SATA drives and already having data on the hardware raid? How would I transfer all that?
For this use case there’s not really an advantage using SAS over SATA. I’d suggest buying SATA drives in the future just because you don’t need a SAS card for them, and SATA drives are usually cheaper.
If you use the H700 for hardware RAID and switch to SATA later, your best bet is probably to copy the data over (or better, use the opportunity to test your backup/restore process).
If you could run the SAS disks in JBOD mode (which is possible if you sell the H700 and use another SAS card), you could set up your drives in a RAIDZ1 mode and later switch to SATA drives by replacing one drive at a time and doing a scrub between each swap.
So you mean use it until I have all drives and a data card then copy my NAS to a DAS and then back to my NAS?
And also the cards as far as I know have 2 mini SAS ends so I can’t switch to data one by one, they go in fours?
Yes, you’re going to want to get SATA drives that are the same size or bigger than your SAS drives. The mini-sas will break out into 4x sas connectors but you don’t have to swap 4 at a time; disconnect one SAS drive from the SAS breakout cable and then connect one replacement SATA drive to the SATA backplane (either the one on your motherboard or to a SATA card if you don’t have enough mobo ports). Do a zfs scrub. Once it’s finished with no errors, repeat all three steps. Once all drives are off the SAS card and your final scrub is done you can remove the SAS card entirely.
Interesting, so first my best bet would be to her a non raid SAS card and the do what you said ?
Yes, if you’re going to run TrueNAS (or another solution based on ZFS) you should really get rid of the PERC and get an LSI SAS card in IT mode so that the system can see the raw disks.
When you start your SATA swap, either use the onboard SATA ports (if there are enough) or get a SATA card (more ports, probably slightly better performance than sharing the onboard controller) and start the process I described before.
Thanks for you help, I will try this. I will wait until my first SAS dies on noraidSAS card and then get a sata pcie and one by one move to sas
Why not just use what you have until you can afford to and/or need to upgrade? SAS drives are more expensive because they typically offer higher performance and reliability. Hardware raid may be “old” but it’s still very common. The main risk with it is that if your raid card fails, you’ll have to replace it with the same model if you don’t want to rebuild your server from scratch.
I’ve been running an old Dell PowerEdge for several years with no issues.
Hardware raid doesn’t do much to stop silent corruption. At the very least you want to run something like btrfs on top of it.
While sas is faster, the difference is moot if you have even a modest nvme cache.
I don’t know if it’s especially that much more reliable, especially I would take new SATA over second hand sas any day.
The hardware raid means everything is locked together, you lose a controller, you have to find a compatible controller. Lose a disk, you have to match pretty closely the previous disk. JBOD would be my strong recommendation for home usage where you need the flexibility in event of failure.
What I’m worried about is that once one drive fails, then I won’t want to replace it because I want to go full SATA. But then that would mean my NAS storage would shrink and loose data.
That means that I have to replace all drives to data at the same time, and if I have lots of data on the hardware said SAS drives. How do I transfer all that data to the new drives ?
Any ideas? The best I can think of is to have 2 pcie cards one with the raid and another data. But how would they share the data if the SATA is not in the hardware raid pool.
Without knowing what ypu plan is in detail, here’s one example of a plan for a NAS…
- Flash your SAS card or get an LSI card you can flash to IT mode.
- Install TrueNAS Scale and set up your ZFS volume with your existing SAS drives
- If any drive fails, exchange it for a SATA with at least the same size and re-silver.
You wouldn’t need to exchange all of them at the same time as long as the one you are swapping in can hold all the blocks the old one did.
That’s what I was thinking but my wires are mini SAS to SAS and they are in a 1:4 ratio.
Like this
Wouldn’t that mean that it would be impossible to make a drive data it they are connected in 4s
You can often flash these raid cards into IT mode to disable raid and so that they just pass through the raw disks. That way you can hook up either SAS or SATA drives and run them with software raid of your choosing, like ZFS. SATA is probably the safer bet since you will be able to use them in a future build without issues, but there’s no issue with SAS.
If you can’t flash this raid card to IT mode you can buy a cheap LSI 92xx card. They are quite common and cheap, and easy to flash to IT mode.
You’ve already got it, why not use it? There’s nothing wrong with it. Hardware raid is fine, and sas drives are usually cheaper, actually, because not as many people want them.
It shows up in try has as one big 18TB drive (I have 24tb, so raid is working).
How do I configure that? Just put it in one pool? In truenas terms what do I do with the 18tb?
Oh, if you want to run truenas, then replace the controller with a 9211-8i or similar, and put it in IT mode so that truenas can see the raw disks.
You can tell truenas to use it as one big pool, and it’ll work fine, but you’ll lose the native disk health monitoring (I assume truenas has some, I’ve never used it).
I picked up an old Dell server some time ago and wound up finding firmware that made the RAID card passthrough so that TrueNAS could have direct access to disks for ZFS
That server was all SATA based so I’m not sure what options you’ll have, but it’s worth looking into.
Ultimately, my thinking is that just because there’s something “better” out there doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with what you have.
I don’t know that particular card (and can’t see the p/n) but you might be able to use sata drives just fine with a breakout cable (SFF-8087 → 4× SATA)
It has mini SAS connectors that have SAS connections on the other end.
Do you think hardware raid is any good?
Hardware raid limits your flexibility, of any part fails, you probably have to closely match the part in replacement.
Performance wise, there’s not much to recommend them. Once upon a time the xor calculations weighed on CPU enough to matter. But cpus far outpaced storage throughput and now it’s a rounding error. They continued some performance edge by battery backed ram, but now you can have nvme as a cache. In random access, it can actually be a lability as it collapses all the drive command queues into one.
The biggest advantage is simplifying booting from such storage, but that can be handled in other ways that I wouldn’t care about that.
Definitely don’t use hardware raid
There’s nothing wrong with hardware raid. You can probably pass them through as individual drives.
I would use them as is but only buy sata going forward.
Not with ZFS and their for TrueNAS. A hardware raid card is not suitable at all. Even if you set it to jbod mode. It shut actually be flashed to IT mode if that is possible with that card.
Probably on older hard drives like that hardware raid won’t slow things down too much. But holy shit do hardware raid controllers suck with faster HDDs/SSDs. Also they obscure smart info from your OS so you need special software to talk to the raid controller to know if your drives are failing.
Otherwise they’re fine. If that’s what ya got that’s what ya got. Rung what ya brung.
