Starting into Proxmox--Best Version for My Hardware?

[SamirD]

Well… ZFS - and that goes for Ceph as well, both ensure that the data has made it onto the disks correctly. If you do have a (caching) HW-RAID controller between the disks and ZFS/Ceph, it may be that some operations are flagged to be on stable storage, when they in fact aren't. It may not be of much importance in a lab setup, but I'd never trust my data to any HW RAID controller these days. Pressure on price/performance has been so great, that the vendors seem to have settled on shady compromises regarding safe programming. Especially a series of LSI controllers have been infamous for causing all sorts of trouble and LSI is, what still drives most of the HBAs.

But this honestly would only be a problem in write back mode vs write through. I dealt with this issue back in the DOS days on my Mylex DAC960SUI, and the solution was quite easy--don't use write-back.

So basically all write operations are a verify read after write (awesome), but that that caching can effectively 'fool' that and can cause issues when data has been written incorrectly--correct?

 

[budy]

Well… yes, but in the end it's not only that and it depends on your workload… People are often intrigued to value performance over data integrity…

 

[SamirD]

Well… yes, but in the end it's not only that and it depends on your workload… People are often intrigued to value performance over data integrity…

The only workload on the proxmox drives will be simply proxmox as all the important data lives elsewhere. Hence bit errors aren't something I'm so worried about in this scenario. I also don't want to brick perfectly working raid controllers with unsupported cross-flashing--those aren't cheap.