I have eight Samsung Evo 940 SSD 1tb drives that needed a deserving home; so I decided to build another TrueNAS to server as a VMware shared storage appliance. A Dell PowerEdge r620 server was picked out a to use, as it had eight 2.5" drive bays. The dual CPU's e5-2650's should be way more horse power needed to be an ISCSI/NFS target. Eventually they will be upgraded to v2 CPU's as they are stupid cheap on eBay and it is roughly 30% more performance with no extra electricity.
An Intel 64gb SSD was brought out of retirement, installed into a slim-CDROM to 2.5" HDD adapter. This would be where the OS will be installed. However first, I installed Windows Server to it just to test out the hardware and then update the firmware.
First issue I ran into is that even though this server has eight 2.5" drive bays, the backplane only had four drive connectors! I have seen other r620's with only four drive bays, but the other side was a metal face, this one had drive sled in it! Interesting! As luck would have it I found another r620, that had a backplane that did have all 8 drive connectors but was only two hard drives, so the back plane got swapped.
This server has a Perc H710 mini monolithic RAID card with 512mb of battery backed cache. TrueNAS works much better using an actual hard drive controller, not a RAID card where the OS officiates the disk info. It appears that the r710 does not support non-RAID-ed disks. I attempted to pull out the RAID card, to see if the machine would see the drives; it would not. On a previous build (a Dell r320) I removed the RAID card moved the cable to to a different mini-SAS-8087 36 pin connector, thus the system ran the drives off of the onboard SATA controller. This Perc H710 uses a SAS-8654 cable? I didn't have a one into two SAS sas-8087 to go from the single onboard connector to the two back plane connectors.
Well, time to gamble a bit and attempt to flash the Perc into "IT-mode"...basically re-writing the firmware to make it think it is a some sort of LSI 2208 series SAS HBA controller. The H710 does have a faster processor than H310, and with spinning disk one probably would not max out the controller; with SSD's getting to that ceiling is a real possibility. It turns out there is not one but two different versions of the H710, one is PCI-e 2.0 vs 3.0 "capable". If one searches the web for great resource: "Art of the Server", he has lots of great information on these.
Following the steps
here on Jon Fohdeesha's site the BIOS changes were made. The RAID battery removed, the drives removed, the ROM on the Perc was erased, via the FreeDOS utility, although I did erase it three times as it would error out on the 2nd step. The new firmware was then written, the SAS identifier reprogramed. All was successful! During post, one now sees the LSI/Avago BIOS and menu screen. Also interesting is that the Dell "System setup" also see the HBA.
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