I inherited a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge T610 from my work recently. I have it setup with Truenas and plan to have it be our new Jellyfin, file storage, and whatever else I can figure out. But I’m new to Raid setups and was hoping for advice before proceeding. After doing a little research I figured a Raid 5 configuration would be a fun experiment and could help with stability in the long run.
My question is, should I manage drives via the hardware controller? Or Truenas?
The server has a hardware raid controller and the drives have to be configured in the bios in order to be visible by an OS. Easy enough. I setup 4 drives in a Raid 5 configuration, boot to Truenas. I try to make a pool with the vdrive but then Truenas wants to configure it. If I chose anything other than Raid 0 it would cut into the storage even more. So I went back in, changed the 4 drives to Raid 0 in the bios, then setup the pool in Truenas using the 4 individual vdrives. But then I started to wonder if the two would be compatible in the long run?
Then in wondered, is Raid 5 even worth it? I have a single drive I currently use as a direct backup of our important photos, videos, etc. That one is not going in the array but will be copied over for easy access and kept as a backup. So with a direct backup of the important stuff do I really need to sacrifice space for mirroring and parity?
I’m curious what you all think.
Do not use a raid controller with Truenas. Use a HBA such as an LSI 9300 or 9207 (old but fine for HDD). Truemas manages the drive itself and any barrier to that (like device managed SMR drives and Rains controllers) means Truenas does not know where the data is, and you are likely to get data corruption at some point.
On a second look it actually came with one of these cards. It just wasn’t connected. The cable setup unfortunately only let’s me hook up half the drives for now but that works for the time being.
Get a used adaptec arc 82885T which as an expander card. It only needs molex to power it, and it allows the HBA to connect to up to several hundred data drives (HBA to expander to HDD). The documentation is straightforward to understand.
An example: https://ebay.us/m/SYvAxO