Multipath SSD, HBA, and Ubuntu

I’m attempting to create a new home server. When I originally spec’d the machine I was planning to use TrueNAS until I realized I wouldn’t be able to point Plex to my QNAP NAS share for the media. Since this box won’t be my primary storage box I opted to instead switch to Ubuntu.

The box has two idential Team Data SSD’s (512GB) that I wanted to set up in RAID 1 for redundancy and speed that are connected via a LSI HBA adapter. When I attempt to partition the drives it’s showing up as one single drive that’s multipathed. I’ve tried everything I can think of to eliminate that including formatting the drives with the LSI card which, unless I’m mistaken, should have low leveled them and nuked ANY configuration off of them.

Is this a hold over from when I tried to use ZFS and TrueNAS? How do I fix this? I’m almost to the point of moving the drives off the HBA and onto the motherboard and using it’s hardware RAID.

Hi there, welcome back!

Looks like multipath is setup in software. Here are a few links that should provide pointers:

https://www.devunmounted.com/2017/06/19/freenas-and-multipath-setting-up-multipath-on-existing-zfs-pool/

What I gather from this is that the tool to manipulate multipathing on FreeNAS is gmultipath; for Linux it is multipath.

Good luck.

Thanks for the info. From what I read on the serverfault article it seems like this is going to come back after reboot unless I add an argument to the inittab. I’m not sure how this is going to allow me to create a RAID array on install.

I have encountered the multipath -F command before. However, the Ubuntu installer doesn’t appear to have it as part of the default ISO on either the server or desktop versions.

I’m not even sure why I’m encountering this. Is this just a byproduct of using the HBA? Is this something TrueNAS did when I installed it and now I’m paying for it?

I checked the server, it has a LSI SAS9210-8i controller in it. I could firmware update it to enable RAID, but that would prevent it from running in HBA mode. I want to keep the HBA option open for when I eventually populate a storage array in there. So for now I moved the SATA boot drives over to the motherboards onboard Intel RAID controller and set it up to run in RAID 1. I’m reinstalling Ubuntu now.

I just wish I could have used ZFS for the boot drives but it doesn’t seem Ubuntu can do that with my HBA. So I’m going to run standard EXT4 partitions w/ LVM instead.