Lenovo x3650 M5 RAID controller

martinrame · 2026-01-17T12:49:16+0000

Hi, I bought a Lenovo x3650 M5 with 5x8tb HDD SATA III and 2x500gb SSD SATA disks and found it has a ServeRAID M5210 controller that's not suitable for ZFS.

I've been reading and found the recommendation is to install an LSI Logic 9211 8i in IT mode. Can you point me to an specific link to purchase the one I need?, as I'm in Argentina I just want to do one purchase with everything I need, with cables and everything.

cracauer@ · 2026-01-17T12:59:53+0000

The 92xx will take a lot of idle power, the 93xx are using less.

Any of the ebay links might be fine.

T-Daemon · 2026-01-17T13:33:01+0000

martinrame said:
it has a ServeRAID M5210 controller that's not suitable for ZFS.

Can you explain why it is not suitable for ZFS?

The reason I'm asking is out of curiosity. There is a PR 290156 from 2025-10-11 in which the reporter can create a ZFS pool (not boot pool) on 15.0-ALPHA5, from devices attach to a IBM ServeRAID M5210 controller (Avago/LSI MegaRAID SAS-3 3108).

martinrame · 2026-01-17T14:50:39+0000

cracauer@ said:
The 92xx will take a lot of idle power, the 93xx are using less.

Any of the ebay links might be fine.

Thanks, for example this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1264507051...ezTQATDwOB4r3K0KNqGn-uEJ8ZSjJ908aAhv4EALw_wcB

What do you think about it? will it work on the x3650 M5?

martinrame · 2026-01-17T14:52:39+0000

T-Daemon said:
Can you explain why it is not suitable for ZFS?

The reason I'm asking is out of curiosity. There is a PR 290156 from 2025-10-11 in which the reporter can create a ZFS pool (not boot pool) on 15.0-ALPHA5, from devices attach to a IBM ServeRAID M5210 controller (Avago/LSI MegaRAID SAS-3 3108).

Because for ZFS the O.S. needs to access the disks raw, not through the hardware RAID controller.

cracauer@ · 2026-01-17T16:22:41+0000

martinrame said:
Thanks, for example this one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1264507051...ezTQATDwOB4r3K0KNqGn-uEJ8ZSjJ908aAhv4EALw_wcB

What do you think about it? will it work on the x3650 M5?

I don't know that specific computer, but the controller should work in any PCIe machine.

cracauer@ · 2026-01-17T16:23:28+0000

martinrame said:
Because for ZFS the O.S. needs to access the disks raw, not through the hardware RAID controller.

Technically you can put a plain ZFS (no zraid) on top of the single raw device presented by a RAID controller.

But you shouldn't.