is AHCI needed?

[nicko3.0i]

As per my old post, I finally got the HP Proliant ML310 and the drives I have a little issue I'd like to discuss with you about

When disk controller is set to AHCI I cannot choose which drive to boot from, I can only set "Hard disk" and the system picks the #1 disk of the front backplane. No way to override it in the BIOS but changing the controller mode to legacy sata.
In legacy mode, I can individually choose which disk to boot from, spacing from sata 1 to sata 6.
So... is there a workaround for that? I got the thing up & running by installing it to a usb thumbdrive, but I'd like to use a SSD for system installation.... but I can't put that on the first slot of the front backplane. Or is it good to run the drives in legacy sata mode?

Thank you!

 

[sretalla]

Or is it good to run the drives in legacy sata mode?

Running legacy SATA mode won't be too much of an issue for the boot drive.

It's less than ideal for the other drives if they are also impacted by the setting... not sure if you have an HBA involved which would eliminate that issue.

 

[nicko3.0i]

Running legacy SATA mode won't be too much of an issue for the boot drive.

It's less than ideal for the other drives if they are also impacted by the setting... not sure if you have an HBA involved which would eliminate that issue.

That's the problem. The six sata ports of the motherboard are split in something like:
ports 1-4 controller 1
ports 5-6 controller 2

When you select "hard disk" in boot order, it boots from the first disk of the first controller... unless it's set in legacy mode.
AHCI/RAID/LEGACY setting affects both controllers at the same time, so I'll have to keep them all in AHCI mode and use a usb stick as boot drive.
I'll backup it, it should save my a** if it gets worn or damaged :)

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Doesn't it UEFI boot? If yes it will happily boot from the only EFI partition available which should be your boot drive. No matter in which way the disks are ordered. This is in every aspect just so much better than legacy booting ...

Patrick

 

[nicko3.0i]

Doesn't it UEFI boot? If yes it will happily boot from the only EFI partition available which should be your boot drive. No matter in which way the disks are ordered. This is in every aspect just so much better than legacy booting ...

Patrick

Great idea, didn't think of that. The machine is quite old, I'm digging into the bios manual! thank you!

 

[Apollo]

Great idea, didn't think of that. The machine is quite old, I'm digging into the bios manual! thank you!

In Legacy SATA mode, I believe there is no support for hotswapping disks.
In AHCI mode, I believe you need to look in a different section of the BIOS where you can assign and order disk to boot from.

 

[nicko3.0i]

In Legacy SATA mode, I believe there is no support for hotswapping disks.
In AHCI mode, I believe you need to look in a different section of the BIOS where you can assign and order disk to boot from.

If it only were for the non hotswap capability, I wouldn't bother... my drive bays are not hot swappable

Looks like a limitation of that machine bios... and it affects the Microserver Gen8 too... I'll google some more. And I download the freenas updated iso.
I'll have to make tests, better to test with the latest version, so once it works, I'm done!

 

[nicko3.0i]

Fruitless experimentation all day long. Reverted to USB installation of the latest stable version.
Thank you all anyway!