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I've purchased an HP DL360p G8 with a Smart Array P420i 1GB storage controller.

As I'm using FreeNas, I've switched the controler to HBA mode, however now the G8 caddies (original ones) don't show per drive activity LEDs. Only the first slot is showing activity LEDs, all others are off.

This is not very important off course, although I really like the caddies LED animations :D

As anyone managed to configure the controller to have per disk activity LEDs in HBA mode?

Thanks.

Ralms
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  • I’ll respond in detail later. But Freenas It’s not a good fit for this server. – ewwhite Apr 15 '19 at 19:03
  • Thanks, do you mean the controller or the server itself? The server overall I'm really happy with, crazy low idle power (40w) with a 6 core and 2 x 16GB 1600Mhz sticks – Ralms Apr 15 '19 at 23:51
  • Hi @ewwhite, why do you consider the HP DL360p G8 not a good fit for FreeNas ? Thanks – Ralms Apr 17 '19 at 14:04

1 Answers1

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FreeNAS is pretty crappy when it comes to hardware support.

HP ProLiant systems aren't really well suited to FreeBSD and variants, so I tend to steer people to Linux or other support operating systems when using ProLiant server hardware. This is mainly due to hardware, driver and management agents support.

The HP array driver in FreeNAS is the likely cause of your issues with the Smart Carrier LED animation.

This works fine under Linux and HBA mode.

ewwhite
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  • Thank you for that insight, I never thought it could be due the controller drivers, as the controller is in HBA mode my idea was that it would be passtru and those would not come into play. Now I wonder, is there any turn key solution like FreeNAS but running on Linux? – Ralms Apr 20 '19 at 17:24
  • Ok, @ewwhite, I've done some more research on this matter. So FreeNAS is using the cciss driver, however HP moved on to a new driver called hpsa, built on top of Linux SCSI storage layer. I pretty confident that these are not compatible in FreeBSD. As changing server is not an option for me, I wonder if I should simply buy a new storage controller :( – Ralms Apr 20 '19 at 18:02
  • The HP H220 controller is a good HBA for internal drives. I don't know of a FreeNAS equivalent intended for Linux, but I don't think FreeNAS adds much to ZFS. – ewwhite Apr 20 '19 at 21:06
  • The thing that I like about FreeNAS is not as much ZFS by itself, is the rest surrounding it, sharing etc. Just makes life easier. Thanks for the suggestion on the H220. – Ralms Apr 20 '19 at 23:12