R730xd raid on rear flexbay, passthrough on front bay?

[FingerBlaster]

I just got an r730xd. I want to add a mid plane to it.

I want to have the os drives in the rear flex bay and just be a hardware raid. I want to virtualize freenas and pass through the front drives and mid drives to vmware or proxmox.

Is it possible to plug the rear flex bay into the onboard h730, then add a pcie hba to plug the front backplane and mid plane into?

 

[panzer]

Not that I am aware when I was tinkering with my r730xd. Ran a h730 in the pcie slot and flashed my h330 to hba330. There are some caveats when doing it this way. EFI boot must be disabled and you will get an error when it does not detect the flex bay. You must check continue on error in the BIOS. Also back in the day EXSI had a problem with the h330 and I had to flash it to a hba330.

 

[FingerBlaster]

if i were to connect the rear flex bay to the onboard card for raid 1 or 0, the sense cable should detect the rear flex bay is there?

I want to connect the main (front with 12 LFF drives) backplane to a pcie hba and pass that through.

 

[panzer]

if i were to connect the rear flex bay to the onboard card for raid 1 or 0, the sense cable should detect the rear flex bay is there?

I want to connect the main (front with 12 LFF drives) backplane to a pcie hba and pass that through.

Sorry I should have been more clear. In all my reading I have never heard of anyone running it in that configuration.

Either way I thought I would tell you about the nuances of running two PERCs and some other issues I came across that would be applicable if it is possible to run it that way.

 

[FingerBlaster]

ah ok, i see what you mean. I found a 1 or 2 posts on reddit of people running an r720xd in the way i want, but they're fairly old.

I could do the opposite of what i want and i imagine it would work. IE: Plug the main (front) backplane into the onboard perc and the flex bay into a pcie controller and unplug the flex bay's sense cable. Just since the system already has an array controller I'd like to use it to run the drives i actually want in a hardware raid config. I imagine the system should have no problem booting off a pcie array controller.

 

[panzer]

I imagine the system should have no problem booting off a pcie array controller.

Unfortunately it means buying two percs but maybe someone knows more then me.

In order to boot from a pcie perc you must disable efi boot like I mentioned earlier.

Good luck it is a hell of a machine, have mine stuffed with all the goodies and sold the rest of my servers. I still have a bunch of USFF's floating around to tinker with though.