Supported Controllers

[Chris Gordon]

> On Feb 14, 2018, at 5:25 AM, Denise Schuck <denise.schuck at ges.thm.de> wrote:
> 
> I have a question concerning supported controllers and can't find anything about that in the documentation.

Some times searching through the man pages gives you better information.

> The system I want to install the FreeBSD distribution FreeNAS has an Adaptec 71605 Controller and an Intel Ethernet Adapter I350-T2.

The aacraid(4) driver lists the Adaptec ASR-70165 as one of the cards it supports. The Intel I350 also works (we use those at work, too) and I think it’s the ixgbe driver but can’t recall specifically.

One of the big advantages of FreeNAS (or FreeBSD) is the ability to use ZFS.  This includes the ease of management and the protection of your data that it provides.  As a general rule, you want to present ZFS with the actual disks and not throw a hardware RAID in between.  Some RAID controllers allow you to turn them into individual target mode either with a setting in their RAID firmware or by flashing them with new firmware.

> (Xeon Processor and 8GB RAM).

The general rule of thumb that ZFS will want 1 GB of RAM for each 1 TB of disk.  The impact of having less RAM is that some of the cache’s (ARC I believe) will not be as big as they could be and you won’t get as good a read performance as you could.  If your system isn’t very busy, especially with reads, then this won’t matter.  I have a system that doesn’t meat the 1:1 ratio and it works perfectly fine.

> Therefore, will it be impossible to install FreeNAS on my hardware? Or is it just a matter of released FreeBSD Versions or hardware drivers I have to install additionally?

In summary, everything you have should work out of the box. 

Chris