[geeks] ZFS on Dell R720?

[John Core]

It wonbt work. Yank the perc controller and order the custom cable that
bypasses the controller and plugs into the motherboard and the drive backplane

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in regione caecorum rex est luscus

> On Jan 3, 2022, at 4:01 PM, David Brownlee <abs at absd.org> wrote:
>
> o;?On Mon, 3 Jan 2022 at 20:17, Phil Stracchino <phils at caerllewys.net>
wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone here have any experience with the Dell PowerEdge R720 and
>> ZFS?  What I've been able to determine is that the Dell Perc H710P
>> controller it comes with does not do JBOD out-of-the-box, *can* present
>> each drive as a single-drive raid0, and *can* be reflashed with
>> initiator-target mode firmware.
>>
>> Anyone have anything else useful to tell me?
>>
>> (I have had such an utterly horrible experience so far with the QNAP
>> Hero series NAS I bought that I'm ready to factory-reset it and return
it.)
>
> I have a somewhat similar setup with a Dell T320, with 8 8TB SATA
> disks (plus one additional disk on the built in AHCI).
>
> After trying the multiple single-drive raid0 approach for a while I
> determined that the 710/710P? PERC card it came with could not be
> flashed to simple initiator mode (if that has changed, then grrr for
> me, but good for you :), so bought something with the same cable
> connections which could be flashed to non RAID firmware - a
> "Supermicro AOC-S2308L-L8I 8-Port SAS/SATA PCI-Express RAID Controller
> Card". My key rationale being if the machine died I could get the
> disks up and running in any arbitrary box with enough SATA
> connections.
>
> It looked a lot like https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/123864361473, except
> that listing seems to be twice the price and already flashed to IT
> firmware.
>
> In my case it now probes as "mpii0: SAS9217-8i, firmware 20.0.7.0, MPI
> 2.0" and has been running ZFS for a little under two years with 8
> drives (plus one on the onboard ahcisata), 6 in a RAIDZ2, two in a zfs
> mirror and one non ZFS for boot.
>
> I have an NVMe which I keep meaning to add as an SLOG, but have not had
time.
>
> (If you do decide to change cards, the PowerEdge may well have a
> different physical space and cable connections for its disk controller
> compared to the deskside T320, so is likely to need to a different
> variant)
>
> I like the proper ECC memory of the T320, but I hate the nearly five
> minute wait from power on to OS bootloader start. I miss my old HP
> Gen7 N54l Microserver packed with five big (for the time) disks :-p
>
> David
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