Free NAS 8x16TiB server Pool Somewhat Faulty HBA Question

Hardware Enterprise Gear
1

I have Just set up a Zfs 2 Pool of 8 HDD’s. (NO DATA ON IT YET)
Only Problem is that to create the array I had to connect 4 Drives to the motherboard directly and 4 of the other ones go through the HBA.

Question:
How hard will it be to move the drives from the motherboard to the HBA if I get a HBA that isn’t faulty?

If the drives are easy to migrate I would start to use the drive pool if not I will wait until I get the HBA card im waiting for or buy a new one.

HBA card Issue
The HBA card has 2 SAS ports that support 4 drives each originally. Port 1 only does 3 drives and port 2 only connects a single drive. What’s wrong with it I have no idea But I know it’s not the cables I have tried 4 different SAS cables with no change. If the HBA card issue is software I have close to no experience with linux commands, or what to look for other than what online guides tell me to do.

I have another one of the HBA’s in the mail but i won’t hold my breath. It was sent from Hong kong and entered my country on the 6th of June, and there has been no update or anything.
Even with the Covid situation the mail that is already in the country generally takes 1-3 days to arrive 4-6 MAX.

Please ask if anything is unclear (Almost Guaranteed)

Hardware:

Motherboard: ASUS Z9PA-U8
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670
RAM: 4x16 64GB DDR3 ECC
HBA: LSI 9200-8i = (9211-8I) IT Mode
HDD’s 8x16TB ST16000NE000
PSU: Seasonic 800W

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As you sure it’s the HBA that’s faulty, not the drives? (although getting a 50% failure rate on them is a bit of an odd chance)

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I don’t see any reason it should be hard. I doubt you’ll have to do anything in FreeNAS at all. Just plug the drives in where you want them.

1 Like
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@freqlabs is correct. A design feature of ZFS is that it stores the vdev information on the drive, not on any controller. So you can swap drives around at any point and they will “just work”.

To @Dutch_Master’s point try cycling the interested drives through the inboard SATA ports to make sure the drives are good and that the power connectors are good. Check you don’t need to do any 3.3v pin mods.

Try a different pcie slot for the HBA and finally boot into the HBA’s flash (usually requires something like ctrl+I or ctrl+S during boot). If the HBA is second hand in may have been setup weird.

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I have tested them one by one in my windows pc they showed up correctly. In the disk managment window.

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I will try the HBA flash Boot when I get home from work.

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