Hardware raid vs ZFS based raid

L

Leo David

Well-Known Member
Apr 25, 2017
115
6
58
45
Hello,
I have a Dell PowerEdge with a PERC H730 Mini controller ( 12Gb/s and 1GB cache size ) that will allow me to create a mix of drives ( raid 1 for OS + rest of disks jbos)
The OS is installed on top of a raid1 array, and I intent to add 4 more enterprise grade data hdd's for creating a pbs datastore.
I do not have any spare dc-grade ssd to use as a caching layer in case of going with zfs

The question that I have regarding performance, best-practices, data availability, or easy future maintenance/replacement is:

Should i go for:

1. create a raid10 raid array at the Perc controller level and add this aray as a datastore ( directory ), and leaving the controller taking care of the things.
or
2. configure the data disks as jbods and create the raid array as a raid10 zfs pool

Any thoughts ?
Cheers,

Leo
 
I think the general consensus is that ZFS + JBOD is not a good match, so option 1 would be the better choice.

Longer term, for future maintenance and flexibility, sourcing a decent non-raid controller would be your best option
 
Thank you Bob,
But something is a bit confusing me in this case
"ZFS + JBOD is not a good match" - this controller can behave as a raid or jbod card as well in a mixed mode.It can have some disks in raid mode, and some disks as jbods. In case of configuring a disk as jbod it will be passing the disks directly to the OS, so acting as an hba card. Its just a matter of configuring the disks ( raid mode or jbod mode ).
So why zfs + jbod would not be a good match ? - in case of choosing option 2
 
PERC H730 should have pass-through mode, so you should be able to just pass selected disks to the OS in (pass-through) HBA mode for ZFS.
 
Thank you Kishi, you are right. So comming back to original question, what would be more appropiate, option 1, or option 2 ?
Thanks,

Leo
 
Confusion of terminology here JBOD is a term that's been around for many years that indicates the controller is managing the device as a individual unit but that it was still not directly exposed to the OS, but at the same time I wasn't aware that the H730 could manage some devices as a raid controller and do device passthrough at the same time.
 
Yes, Bob you are right.
I am sorry, my bad on this. "Pass-through" would be a more straight term.
So now that we decided the disks can also configured in pass-through mode as well, what would it be the best choice to go for ?
Excluding the disks health monitoring considerations that would involve different approaches.
Thank you,

Leo
 
Last edited:
Personally, I would go with ZFS - primarily because it's platform agnostic. Should your existing controller/server fail you can move the drives to another system and still access the data

Then your choice becomes Raid10 or RaidZ2 :)
 
bobmc said:
Personally, I would go with ZFS - primarily because it's platform agnostic. Should your existing controller/server fail you can move the drives to another system and still access the data

Then your choice becomes Raid10 or RaidZ2 :)
Click to expand...
or zfs vdev mirrors, my fav
 
Thank you,
In this case, by not having fast ssd's for caching layer to have a fast zfs pool, it might be better to benefit controller's 1gb cache and go for hw raid10.
Not much, but might add some performance.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom