RAID 5

[schoondoggy 805]

The N40l and the N54l are still being used by many. They tend to use a lean OS like FreeNAS.

[g725s 18]

On 12/12/2019 at 10:46 PM, schoondoggy said:

The N40l and the N54l are still being used by many. They tend to use a lean OS like FreeNAS.

 

Can you use a P410 with FreeNAS?

[schoondoggy 805]

Last I checked FreeNAS did not get along well with RAID cards. The preferred configuration was an HBA or SATA controller and letting FreeNAS do software RAID. If you want to try FreeNAS on the N40l, I would try the onboard SATA or a LSI based HBA.

[LVLouisCyphre 3]

You never use hardware and software RAID together regardless of the OS; it's one or the other.  It's a wise person's errand on a fool's journey.  You're looking for fault tolerance which is understandable.  You're negating that with ZFS with a hardware RAID controller.  If the OS is doing software RAID, it's doing the RAID functionality.  If you're going to migrate to FreeBSD or FreeNAS (which is based on FreeBSD), you use the onboard SATA ports preferably in AHCI mode.  The preferred configuration is RAIDZ2 which is software RAID6 under ZFS. 

 

The current school of disaster recovery is that the most likely point of failure is going to be a drive and not other hardware if it's on a UPS.  You can have two drive failures before you lose the array in a RAID6 but you lose capacity over RAID5.  You need a minimum of four drives to run RAID6 which is what you get with all gens of HP Microservers.

 

If you're going to do a hardware RAID then you run UFS under FreeBSD.  The HP P410 is supported under the FreeBSD ciss(4) driver if you want to do hardware RAID.

[nrf 119]

good points here. I'm leery of hardware raid anyway, got burnt the first time I tried it.

 

gen7s are somewhat memory limited, will a RAIDZ2 setup be satisfactory on a 8gb system? I've been looking at freenas for a while but haven't tried it yet...

Edited January 20 by nrf

[LVLouisCyphre 3]

Quote

gen7s are somewhat memory limited, will a RAIDZ2 setup be satisfactory on a 8gb system? I've been looking at freenas for a while but haven't tried it yet...

The FreeNAS community has stated the minimum hardware requirement is 8 GB of RAM. 

 

G7s work with 16 GB of RAM; it's not supported by HP.  There's been quite a bit of documented butthurt on the FreeNAS forum on people going cheap with non-ECC memory.  If you're going to go cheap on system memory then run a hardware RAID.  If you're going to run ZFS then you abstain from hardware RAID and use the maximum memory your system supports.

 

A pair of ECC 8 GB UDIMMs are not too difficult or costly to find on Amazon or eBay.  QA it for a day or two using Memtest86(+).  The only reason for running only 8 GB on a HP Microserver G7 is if you can't find an affordable pair of 8 GB ECC UDIMMs.