[OpenIndiana-discuss] Opinions on LSI RAID vs. ZFS

[Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana)]

> From: Stefan Müller-Wilken [mailto:stefan.mueller-wilken at acando.de]
>  
> Question now: what would you recommend? 8 LSI RAID0 LVs under ZFS, 8
> drives under LSI RAID-5, or switch to an Oracle certified controller with JBOD
> mode (which one??)? Does it make sense to go for Soft RAID anyway, with
> that configuration?

As you said, JBOD is best.  But if you're running on HBA's that don't support JBOD, you need to use a bunch of RAID-0 volumes with single disks in them.  

You said something about can't do failover, hotspare, or something, with the RAID-0 volumes.  I suggest you look at that again.  There is nothing preventing you from failing over to hotspares etc, just because you're using RAID-0 on your HBA.

If you can get the controller that supports JBOD, then great.  The main advantage of that is portability of those drives to other systems.  When an HBA requires making drives into RAID-0, the HBA necessarily stores metadata in something similar to a partition scheme, before presenting the remainder of the disk to the OS.  This has the side effect of making the drives unusable if you happen to require taking them out and attaching to a different system.  (In the event of an HBA failure for example.)  

The JBOD vs RAID-0 advantage is both simplicity of management, and better portability.  But if you have to live with RAID-0, it's completely possible.

JBOD or RAID-0 with ZFS...  Both ways are *far* better than hardware controlled RAID-5.