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

[Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana)]

> From: Peter Tribble [mailto:peter.tribble at gmail.com]
> 
> This is where I get a little confused. Why an extra HBA at all - what's
> wrong with using the SAS ports on the system board?

My usual reason for using an HBA is for hot plug, and red blinking lights on failed drives.  If you have degraded redundancy, the last thing you want is to accidentally remove the wrong drive.

I find, with the motherboard built-in sas controller, you usually need to power off in order to swap a drive, and you need to "devfsadm -Cv" after coming up, in order to make the new drive available.