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Date:      Sat, 19 Jan 2019 13:29:29 -0600
From:      jdelisle <jdelisle@gmail.com>
To:        Maciej Jan Broniarz <gausus@gausus.net>
Cc:        freebsd-fs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ZFS on Hardware RAID
Message-ID:  <CAMdBLfQc6pWtYv2JTZsBT9HuQ1xbfvAjO0PXQLUzObUF367A4g@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <92646202.63422.1547910433715.JavaMail.zimbra@gausus.net>
References:  <1180280695.63420.1547910313494.JavaMail.zimbra@gausus.net> <92646202.63422.1547910433715.JavaMail.zimbra@gausus.net>

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You'll find a lot of strong opinions on this topic over at the FreeNAS
forums.   I too am wish an authoritative, knowledgeable SME would answer
and thoroughly explain the inner workings and the risks involved.  Most of
the FreeNAS forum posts on this topic devolve into hand-waving and blurry
incomplete explanations that end in statements like "trust me, don't do
it".  I'd love to understand why not.  I'm curious and eager to learn more.

>From my anecdotal non-expert experience, I ran FreeNAS on 14x 1TB HGST
drives as individual RAID0 devices via a SAS HBA that did not support JBOD/
IT mode.  This worked very well for me, though I didn't experience drive or
controller failure so I can't speak to what would have happened.  I created
a script that would interrogate the drives' SMART data, and send me a
monthly report so I could see trends in their stats.  FreeNAS did not
support interrogating them for SMART data due to the RAID adapter, but with
the correct parameters, smartctl was easily able to so for me.

Even though the FreeNAS forum explanations feel incomplete and unsatisfying
(to me), I'd suggest following their advice for a production system.  For
all I know, they may thoroughly understand these inner workings, and just
don't feel like (or are bad at) explaining it to the community.  Better to
be safe than sorry with production data.  In my example above, it was just
my home lab, and I had very good backups.



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