[zfs-discuss] ZFS on Dell with FreeBSD

[Fajar A. Nugraha]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Dave Pooser <dave.zfs at alfordmedia.com> wrote:
> On 10/19/11 9:14 AM, "Albert Shih" <Albert.Shih at obspm.fr> wrote:
>
>>When we buy a MD1200 we need a RAID PERC H800 card on the server
>
> No, you need a card that includes 2 external x4 SFF8088 SAS connectors.
> I'd recommend an LSI SAS 9200-8e HBA flashed with the IT firmware-- then
> it presents the individual disks and ZFS can handle redundancy and
> recovery.

Exactly, thanks for suggesting an exact controller model that can
present disks as JBOD.

With hardware RAID, you'd pretty much rely on the controller to behave
nicely, which is why I suggested to simply create one big volume for
zfs to use (so you pretty much only use features like snapshot,
clones, etc, but don't use zfs self healing feature). Again, others
might (and have) disagree and suggest using volumes for individual
disk (even when you're still relying on hardware RAID controller). But
ultimately there's no question that the best possible setup would be
to present the disks as JBOD and let zfs handle it directly.

-- 
Fajar