this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
0 points (NaN% liked)

Selfhosted

59623 readers
1767 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm looking for a solution to connect some SAS disks to my HP dl380g9 to use with ZFS. I understand that HW RAID with ZFS is a big no-no and that a HBA in IT mode is the best solution as that is passing the disks through to the OS as-is.

Some cards can only be put into an HBA mode which also presents the disks to the OS individually, but it is not a true pass through, as far is I understood. It should be a lot better than HW Raid, though.

Picking up such a card would be the simplest solution for me. P440ar cards are available for dirt cheap, don't require a PCI slot and I can re-use the existing SAS cables without worrying that whatever a non HP card uses does not plug into into the backplane of the HP dl380g9.

Is HBA mode fine for ZFS? Or should I make sure to pick up an LSI card that supports the true IT mode?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

Initiator Target mode and Host Bus Adapter mode are interchangable terms for the same thing. The card has 2 modes, one is RAID (don't use this) and the other is Initiator-Target or HBA mode.

ZFS needs direct disk access so flash the IT .bin for HBA mode using the P20 (latest) drivers and you're g2g.