Which storage type to use with Dell H710

[weust]

I acquired a Dell T320 which came with a PERC H710 RAID controller.
It's bought purely for home usage, and I plan to consolidate my NAS and hypervisor to it, and thus was looking at Proxmox.

I've been reading a bit, and it seems the best way is to use a (RAID) controller that can do passthrough or JBOD, neither which the H710 can do, sadly.
Which, if I understand it correctly, leaves out ZFS and such because those want direct disk control and not virtual disks like RAID0 for every single disk.

What I would like to know/understand is, how can I use Proxmox in such a way that I can the T320 server be my NAS and hypervisor in one box.
If it means buying a SAS2208 or SAS2308 type card, that's an answer too. Just wondering if there are alternative ways.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Klaus Steinberger]

you can setup all drives as RAID0, but that both an additional layer, and also will probably give you some hassle when you have to exchange disks, but ZFS wil work on it.

Better is of course to acquire a SAS HBA , but they have to have the IT Mode !

there are some cheap Dell H310 out there, which can be flashed to the IT mode:
https://tylermade.net/2017/06/27/ho...-lsi-9211-8i-firmware-hba-for-freenas-unraid/

It is not possible to flash your H710 to IT mode (you probably brick your Dell, so maybe its better to flash the H310 in another box)

 

[weust]

I know about the IT mode. It's too bad the H710 can't be flashed :-(

Read about the H310 flashing. Guess I will chase after one of those.

Am I right in assuming that having a BBU and write cache module won't matter for IT mode?

Thanks for the reply.

 

[Klaus Steinberger]

yep BBU and write cache module are useless for IT mode

 

[weust]

Alright, thanks. H310 in incoming from eBay.

 

[ShashikalaMN]

The best RAID-controller is the PERC H710p. It is based on a dual-core LSISAS2208 ROC (dual-core Power at 0.8 GHz), which is a mid-range RAIDchip.