Advice on a LSI 9210/9211

[MidnightInAurora]

Hello,

I have a question about RAID on a planned FreeNas box.  It will be housed in a HP Microserver Gen 8 and have 4 8TB drives.

 

I planning on using a LSI 9210/9211 card.  I would like 2 drives in Raid 1 and 2 drives in Raid 0.  The 5th drive will be a SSD boot drive in the optical bay connected to the 9210.

 

My question(s):

 

Is my assumption that I'll need a LSI flashed as IR correct?

Will the LSI support having a SSD boot drive on port 5 (or 1)?

Will that SSD need to be a single-drive Raid 0 or can it be configured to just a MBR JBOD?

 

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks.

 

Jim

[schoondoggy]

I have not worked with FreeNAS in years, but it appears that using hardware RAID with FreeNAS is till on their worst practice list:

FreeNAS: A Worst Practices Guide - TrueNAS Open Storage | ZFS for the Home to the Data Center

FreeNAS and most other Linux based NAS software tends to prefer using HBAs and letting FreeNAS handle to RAID functions. If you do decide to use a hardware RAID the LSI card would need to run IR firmware.

[MidnightInAurora]

17 minutes ago, schoondoggy said:

I have not worked with FreeNAS in years, but it appears that using hardware RAID with FreeNAS is till on their worst practice list:

FreeNAS: A Worst Practices Guide - TrueNAS Open Storage | ZFS for the Home to the Data Center

FreeNAS and most other Linux based NAS software tends to prefer using HBAs and letting FreeNAS handle to RAID functions. If you do decide to use a hardware RAID the LSI card would need to run IR firmware.

 

I agree.  Since writing that post I've decided to skip separate Raid with FreeNas.  I have 9210s flashed with IT.

 

Thank you.

 

Jim