Should I go with ZSH or Dell PERC H730P RAID Controller /w 2GB NV Cache

[Jecode]

Hello all!

New proxmox user here. I went and purchased an old Dell PowerEdge R730 server, which has PERC H730P RAID-controller.

I've now installing proxmox 3rd time again, and having hard time deciding should I go with hardware raid (proxmox on 2x1TB Cruzial SSD RAID-1, and storage on 4x1,8TB SAS disks in RAID-5), or just set RAID controller in HBA-mode, and setup raid with ZFS.

I found out that there are opinions on for either options, but feels like more and more people are saying that ZFS would be the way to go?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Johannes S]

This depends on your usecase and ssd type. Please take in mind that ZFS RAIDZ is said to kill performance thus it might be better to set the drives up as mirror or RAIDZ10 see https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/raidz-2-oder-raid10.74941/ and https://www.45drives.com/community/articles/RAID-and-RAIDZ/
ZFS on hardware raid is not supported if I recall correctly as it might lead to problems.
ZFS has more benefits than RAID (bitrot protection, high flexibility, zfs replication with send/receive) but it doesn't play nice with consumer hardware (performance is said to be not so good as with different file systems and wearout is higher with ZFS).