raid-1: HW or ZFS?

R

Rhinox

Active Member
Sep 28, 2016
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Hi Proxmox-users,
I know this has been discussed here a few times (I found some threads but no definite answers) so I'm going to ask once more: with just two local 500GB SSD-disks in small hobby-server, what kind of raid1-solution should I use? hardware (using add-on raid-controller), or software (provided by ZFS)?

I have a few spare M5016/LSI9270 controllers I used recently for VMware/ESXi-server, so it is no extra cost for me. But it would take the only pcie-slot I have, and it puts certain demands on cooling, power and space (not easy to find in 1U supermicro SC504-case). btw, just a few weeks ago one of those raid-controllers failed silently, so I realized even hw-raid is not "bullet-proof" solution.

Concerning ZFS, I have heard it has some useful features (snapshots, CoW, etc), needs a lot of RAM for caching (I could reserve ~10GB out of 64GB for it), but otherwise I have no experience with it. I do not know how it works with Proxmox. And I'm a little confused now, as I have read somewhere Proxmox does not support software-raid (?)...

As I said, my experience with raid-arrays is pretty much one-sided, but there might be someone with both HW- and ZFS-raid experience, and could help me to put more light on this...
 
OT: server was not responsive. I came to it and saw some leds still on, fans running, but otherwise nothing. I attached console, but screen was empty and did not react to keyboard, no ctrl+alt+del. I pressed "reset" and found "no disk" message. And then I realised it booted somehow fast, because raid-controller's bios did not show up (it took usually about minute to initialize, and had to show before normal mobo-bios shows)...

I took out raid-controller (without disks) and tried to test it in my PC where I usually flash them with new bios, and it did not show up at all. A few leds on controllers were dark. So I took spare controller of the same type, put it to server, attached disks, and everything was OK. It correctly assembled arrays (iirc, array-configuration is stored on disks), even re-syncing was not necessary...
 
I was surprised, by really no. Just switched controller, and that was all. I suppose server was sitting idle at the time of failure. The controller had separate BBU which I re-attached to the new one, maybe this helped...
 
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