HBA

Dell R720 flashing Dell PERC H710 mini into IT mode

2 Comments / DELL, hardware, HBA, Open Source, R720 / By /

Dell PowerEdge Servers are common in #homelab use. The hardware gets sold after it goes out of warranty and they get dumped. Most of the disk cards in these servers come flashed for use with RAID and RAID only. Never use a RAID card with ZFS. Always give ZFS direct access to the drives. I won’t go into the details because the reasons why are easily researched. These cards usually arrive in IR […]

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Adding a zroot pool to an existing system

Leave a Comment / beadm, Disks, File Systems, FreeBSD, hardware, HBA, ZFS / By /

Current FreeBSD versions will allow you to create a zroot zpool from which you can boot. However, when I created the main zpool for slocum (on Fri May 3 2:16 2013), that option did not exist. You might ask: how do I know that date? [dan@slocum:~] $ zfs get creation system NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE system creation Fri May 3 2:16 2013 – At present, the system boots from a raidz2 zpool. This

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After replacing 3TB drive with 5TB drive, FreeBSD 10.3 system did not reboot

1 Comment / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, HBA, Open Source, ZFS / By /

I started replacing 3TB drives with 5TB drives in a 10 drive raidz3 array on a FreeBSD 10.3 box. I was not sure which drive tray to pull, so I powered off the server, and, one by one, pulled the drive tray, photographed it, and reinserted the drive tray. No changes were made. The first reboot Upon powering up, I was greeted by this (I have typed out the text for search purposes):

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Flashing an LSI SAS 9201-16i – correctly

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Three weeks ago, I thought I had flashed my new LSI SAS 9201-16i. I had not. When I powered up the system via mfsBSD, I could see the device, but during the boot process, there was no splash screen. I now believe this should always be a signal that you have not correctly flashed the card. Finally, I went back to basics. I went back to something I did in photos. I used

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Flashing an LSI SAS 9201-16i

2 Comments / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, HBA / By /

WARNING: This did not work. It succeeded, without error, but the card did not work. There will be a new blog post soon. Yesterday, a new LSI SAS 9201-16i arrived. I bought it on eBay from a supplier in China and paid for expedited shipping. I offered US$250 for their $338 listing and it was accepted. Shipping was another $30. It arrived 6 days later. Why do I need one? The system in

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Flashing IT firmware for LSI 9211-8i on FreeBSD

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The LSI 9211-8i 6Gb/s SATA +SAS HBA, which I recently obtained, is running the stock IR (Integrated RAID) firmware. In order to use the disks in strictly passthrough mode and avoid having any metadata written to them by the card, the card needs to be changed over to IT (Initiator Target) firmware. I had heard about this before. And I’ve read it about it on the From 32 to 2 ports: Ideal SATA/SAS

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