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December 8th, 2022 17:00
Disable RAID on PERC H730P
I will be buying:
1x Dell R6415 8bay 2.5" 1U with iDRAC Enterprise
1x AMD EPYC 7551P 32CORE 2.00GHZ
128GB RAM
1x PERC H730P 2GB cache Mini Mono
1x Enterprise SSD 400GB
7x 2TB 7.2K 12G SAS 2.5"
2x 550W PSU
1x Rails
I want to install proxmox operating system on the SSD and then using proxmox admin create a ZFS option for storage using the 7x 2TB drives for running virtual machines and containers. Proxmox specifies that ZFS CANNOT be run on hardware RAID of any sort so with this new server can I disable 100% the RAID option and let the disks be seen in the operating system as single disks?
Even JBOD cannot be used also as per a post in proxmox forum:
"It depends...often those raid controllers create a JBOD or single disk raid0. This is not what you want with ZFS. You want it to operate in initiator-target mode (IT-mode) so a dumb HBA without any abstraction layer between ZFS and the disks. See here why using HW raid with ZFS isn'T a good idea: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Performance and Tuning/Hardware.html#hardware-raid-controllers
So you better verify that the raid is really entirely disabled.
There are some PERCs that can be crossflashed from IR-mode to IT-mode, but it looks like your PERC 730 Mini is not one of them: https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html"
Because I dont have the server yet I cannot test any settings in the BIOS so I was wondering if anyone else has any experience with disabling Hardware RAID 100% and using proxmox?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards
James


DELL-Shine K
6 Operator
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3K Posts
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December 8th, 2022 18:00
Can you explore HBA mode on H730. You can refer below links for details
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/poweredge-rc-h730/perc9ugpublication/perc-9-personality-management?guid=guid-bc0aac4e-f574-4202-9379-be3a4d6a142c&lang=en-us
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/poweredge-rc-h730/perc9ugpublication/switching-the-controller-to-hba-mode?guid=guid-1fcc87e1-d534-451a-9947-56f1175886c5&lang=en-us
Dell-Dheeraj
143 Posts
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December 9th, 2022 00:00
Hi @jhorrocks,
Absolutely, as the user manual says that if the PERC is set to HBA mode, It doesn't have the option to create a RAID.
The PERC controller here will only serve as a conduit between the OS and the drives.
jhorrocks
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December 9th, 2022 00:00
Ok, so this means I can 100% turn off all RAID, JBOD or software RAID if I just set to HBA mode right?
I wish I had the server right now so I could test.
So this mean I should be able to enable ZFS in proxmox using all SAS drives right?
jhorrocks
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December 9th, 2022 16:00
Thank you very much, great help and clear advice : )