[SOLVED] What card would I need to get this RAID enclosure working with FreeNAS or Linux?

[jrish82]

Hi All,

Bought and old enclosure on a whim off Ebay, and slightly regretting it now as I'm not sure it will do what I need. I was hoping to connect it to a regular desktop PC running a Linux server (OpenMediaVault?), or maybe FreeNAS. The enclosure seems to be a rebranded version of this Enhancy Technology T8-R. It looks exactly the same and has the dual U320 SCSI ports.

I think I've already managed to buy an incorrect PCI-E card for it, got this HP SCSI card but it looks like that one is just for tape backups, not RAID.

So assuming I could actually get this enclosure working, what type of pci-e card and cables would I need? Would they still work on recent versions of Linux/FreeNAS? Will it definitely work with 5 year old 3.5 SATA drives?

Thanks!

 

[Lutfij]

Going by what you've include, I doubt you will have much luck with that enclosure in terms of OS support, thought it could be tried. As for your network card, you might want to look at the cards that are listed at the bottom of the window for the enclosure.

About your drives, are the all identical? If not, you can go for a JBOD setup not RAID though I would also advise on looking through the validated HDD list at the bottom of the enclosures list.

 

[jrish82]

Ha, didn't see the cards there, thanks!

Some of the drives are the same, but if that's a requirement for RAID I'll probably just go with JBOD. Will I need to check the card/enclosure can do JBOD, or is that a given?

It's safe to assume the drives aren't on the approved list, how picky are these enclosures?

Edit: If seen mention of Red Hat Linux, related to this enclosure, if I get an old version of Fedora from around when this was released would that be more likely to run it? I suppose I'd have the issue of it being a really old version of network sharing software though.