SSDs: volume with h/w RAID or ZFS?

alexc

Active Member
Apr 13, 2015
123
4
38
Keep at my hands nice modern server with 4 SSDs on board, I still can't find the better way to utilize it.

I can use built-in h/w RAID controller (LSI card, with cache and BBU, not sure for model) and build, say, RAID10 out of these disks. Or I can export these disks as 4 independent volumes via this controller, then use magic of ZFS and build RAID-Z out of it, thus I will use ZFS to keep volume up and running.

I do like ZFS but yet not sure if SSD exported as volume with h/w RAID card will do the same good as without h/w card.

Please advice!
 
Hi,

if you have a real HW Raid with BBU and cache you can't use ZFS on this controller.
ZFS needs 100% control over the disks and a real HW Raid will never give this control.
 
Hi,

if you have a real HW Raid with BBU and cache you can't use ZFS on this controller.
ZFS needs 100% control over the disks and a real HW Raid will never give this control.
Exactly. This is the reason for the question.

PVE detects these disk as disks made by LSI vendor, and no smart etc can be seen. So use zfs is a bit weak idea, isn't it?

But LSI won't care for its ssd nature, nor it can do zfs data integrity checks.
 
So use zfs is a bit weak idea, isn't it?
Do not use this combinations.
The problem is nobody can tell you what problem you have to expect.
This can work at the beginning very well and when the pool is under pressure the performance is drop to some Bytes per second.

But LSI won't care for its ssd nature,
ZFS has no trim support yet.
 
ZFS has no trim support yet.
This is weakest part. But yet I do no know if LSI supports trim as well, something that I need to check too.

Ok, looks like raid is the only option I have.

But are there any proof for lack of trim support in zfs? I expected it is there right from the start.
 
But are there any proof for lack of trim support in zfs? I expected it is there right from the start.
I personally run my home server with ZFS on SSD.
Sure it would be faster if you have trim support, but as ZFS use caches so it is not that bad.
But they are working on this feature.
 
Hi,

With a SSD zfs pool, fstrim is not a really big concern. I use zfs on several ssd for 2 year at least, without any problems. But after some months of usege I remove one SSD from the server, and on a desktop I make a ext4 fs and a fstrim. After that I put my ssd back in the pool (with resilver).
 

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