Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 09:51:03 -0600 From: Alan Somers <asomers@freebsd.org> To: "D'Arcy Cain" <darcy@druid.net> Cc: freebsd-fs <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: RAID - hardware vs. ZFS Message-ID: <CAOtMX2jfYCAiqoXrDO3GpanNn8O=YrE1DC2HY6tRDKyGKNvnCg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <e2ae7253-732b-ea37-f6d8-b93a5d532da2@druid.net> References: <e2ae7253-732b-ea37-f6d8-b93a5d532da2@druid.net>
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These days you're probably better off with ZFS software RAID. It's fast enough (easily 1GB/s on most modern hardware), rebuilds much faster for mostly empty pools (though slower for mostly full pools), and handles hot swapping well. Unlike hardware RAID, ZFS RAID is robustly protected by a Merkle hash tree of the entire file system, so undetected corruption is virtually impossible. And most importantly, the code is accessible and open source, so problems can be fixed. I haven't heard of any serious ZFS RAID bugs, but even if one pops up it is at least possible to fix it. That's not the case with HW RAID. I've heard of multiple commercial projects that failed just because of bugs in the hardware RAID that the vendor couldn't or wouldn't fix. -Alan On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 9:46 AM D'Arcy Cain <darcy@druid.net> wrote: > I have to purchase new servers soon. I am planning on getting Proliant > DL360 servers. These come with hardware RAID. I was wondering what > opinions people had about hardware RAID vs. using ZFS for RAID. Is one > safer than the other? What about performance? What about hot swapping? > > All opinions welcome. > > -- > D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> | Democracy is three wolves > http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on > +1 416 788 2246 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner. > IM: darcy@VybeNetworks.com, VoIP: sip:darcy@druid.net > >
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