The goals we wanted to accomplish were creating a RAID5 array of 8 (7+1 Hot Spare) 1TB hard drives and then wanted to connect this FreeNas volume through and iSCSI channel to a file server that will present the NAS as a shared folder all of our servers could use.
We quickly found that using the factory PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controller) to create a RAID 5 Array was not going to work. Mostly because the drivers for this device provided in FreeNas are not very stable. …show more content…
Some Caveats:
FreeNas does not have the ability to automatically switch to the spare drive using this configuration. If a drive fails, it must be manually changed.
If a drive is physically removed, the PERC will drop it from the configuration. It will be necessary to recreate the new virtual drive in the PERC BIOS. Otherwise FreeNas will never see the new drive.
This is a reprint of my original article found here: