I'm currently swapping out some servers in the company I work for. We used to have FreeNAS in a virtual environment (vmware) for not-so-important stuff. Now we want to use it as a backup store, so I looked into bare metal installation since it is recommended in the FreeNAS Documentation.
Now to my issue: underlying RAID or not? If yes, what kind? They suggest JBOD which the RAID controller doesn't seem to support, so I'm a bit unsure what to do. I suppose the next best thing would be RAID 0 and let the rest be handled by FreeNAS...
I'm really tired, overworked and trying to balance 6 projects at once currently so there might be an inherently wrong thought process here...
Any help is appreciated. And if I may be so bold @wendell: Do you have any hints or ideas?
Hi there, no personal experience with freeNAS so i cant help a lot, but what i can share with you, from watching the video wendall did on RAID setups, is do NOT use any hardware RAID. instead set up a software RAID, suggest you go watch the video on it for a bit more details.
if you can give some rough figuers at to how many disks you have, what kind of data throughput your looking for, redundancy levels, etc. im sure we can figure out what RAID config you want.
Most of the raid controllers you would be dealing with support a flash to pass through mode of IT mode which will support disk passthrough and you should do that so freenas can see the individual disks. It's important that freenas have as direct as possible access to each disk.
Do you know what controllers? There is probably a howto somewhere for the specific controllers you have. Otherwise LSI controllers from eBay are pretty cheap.