Sod it. Dell PERC H200 SAS. Stuck in an offer of £20, accepted. All I need to do now is flash an LSI IT mode firmware on it, as that's basically what it is. Good thing is it's faster (SATA 6gb not 3) and will work. It's one of only about three that does.
OK. It is *finally* done. Let me run you through some stuff to make it work for you, so you don't have to run up and down the pigging stairs all pigging last night and it will work first time. Firstly you must have an LSI card. Or a Dell, which you then flash. I used this tutorial here. https://techmattr.wordpress.com/201...-flashing-to-it-mode-dell-perc-h200-and-h310/ Which was confusing, as it doesn't tell you certain info. Firstly, when you install the Dell card you will get a Boot ROM firmware thing as with any RAID card. However, once you flash it using the above you lose that. He doesn't include the IT ROM, which is fine, but if you expect to see it and think you killed the card it can be a red herring. Basically download his stuff. Make a Rufus boot DOS disk. Copy across his stuff, but not what he has left from Rufus. Simply cancel the over write. Boot into the flash stick you made (Legacy mode only). Then do this. H200 DOS: sas2flsh.exe -c 0 -list Write down SAS address. megarec.exe -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin If this fails move on to next step. megarec.exe -cleanflash 0 Reboot. sas2flsh.exe -o -f 6GBPSAS.fw Reboot. sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118it.bin or sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118p7.bin, reboot, then s2fp19.exe -o -f 2118it.bin s2fp19.exe -o -sasadd 500xxxxxxxxxxxxx So in other words ignore the whole guide and simply just do that. Don't worry about bricking the card. I bricked mine twice trying to restore the ROM, but found I didn't need to. OK. So once that is done when you boot FreeNAS...Nothing will happen. It won't see the card nor any drives attached to it. Once again this is not explained *anywhere* and I only worked it out because of something that happened when I originally tried to install FreeNAS. I put in my Adaptec card in JBOD and FreeNAS crashed on install. So I removed the Adaptec, installed it, then added the Adaptec back but nothing happened. It turns out that whenever you add hardware to FreeNAS you have to reinstall it. Of course as soon as I made a new FreeNAS boot stick and installed I *immediately* saw "SAS card address 8 ports" etc on install. Once install was completed? yeah, it works alright. I used a test drive I set up as a pool on the SAS card and sure enough it saw it. So now I have many SATA ports. I am very happy !
Right so final chapter the final. I ordered a 3tb drive for the movies (up from 1tb which was twice as much as I need) and it never arrived. So I just ordered another one from Amazong. I also ordered a 120gb SSD for a cache drive. Is this important? I mean at £15 I may as well right? But if you could explain what it does and what potential uplift without me spending hours going through FreeNAS very complex documentation I would happreciate it. I should be able to put it all back together for the last time soon.
From what I understand... Store the most frequently used files on the SSD cache to speed up overall performance. Kinda a bit like an SSHD drive. I could be wrong though...
Yeah that's what my buddy has said via email so yeah, that could well be it. That's cool tbh. Deffo worth £15.
