Dell HBA and FreeNAS

Question

I have an aging PE2950(II) and I am looking to run FreeNAS 9.x on it. It currently has plenty of RAM in it. My issue is with the PERC 5/I Integrated storage controller in it. I have head ways of flashing the card so it is only an HBA and not a RAID card. Running the controller with a bunch of single drive RAID-0 is not an option because of it being unstable. I have seen topic about flashing the card so it just acts as an HBA and not a RAID card. Dell even seems to have a firmware ( www.dell.com/.../DriversDetails;fileId=2991233692&osCode=WNET&productCode=poweredge-2950&languageCode=EN&categoryId=SE ) to support that. When I tried to update the firmware, it said that this updated doesn't apply to my system.   When I run 'dsu --inventory' I get the following output so I know I have the right firmware to hardware:  [root@usbstick ~]# dsu --inventoryGetting System Inventory... 1. OpenManage Server Administrator ( Version : 8.2.0 ) 2. BIOS ( Version : 2.7.0 ) 3. PERC 5/i Integrated Controller 0 Firmware ( Version : 5.2.2-0072 ) 4. Firmware for - Disk 0 in Backplane 0 of PERC 5/i Integrated Controller 0 ( Version : ES62 ) 5. Firmware for - Disk 1 in Backplane 0 of PERC 5/i Integrated Controller 0 ( Version : T107 ) 6. SAS/SATA Backplane 0:0 Backplane Firmware ( Version : 1.05 ) 7. NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet rev 12 (eth5) ( Version : 2.9.1 ) 8. NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eth6) ( Version : 7.2.14 ) 9. NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eth8) ( Version : 7.2.14 ) 10. NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eth4) ( Version : 7.2.14 ) 11. NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet rev 20 (eth7) ( Version : 7.2.14 ) Anybody have any ideas of why the firmware isn't installing? If anyone has experience with this not work, would someone please recommend a Dell SAS HBA that provides internal access for at least 6 internal drives (in a backplane) that ONLY does SAS/SATA and no RAID.

DELL-Josh Cr · Answer

Hi, The SAS5/i and the PERC5/i are not the same card and there is not a validated method to flash the SAS5/i firmware onto the PERC5/i to make it work like that.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

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