zfs raid and/or hardware raid..

[Erik Trulsson]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:58:04PM -0500, B. Cook wrote:
> I have a dimension 9150 that I am going to put amd64 freebsd on to play 
> with.
> 
> It has Intel ICH7 SATA300 on it, in the bios it says it can do raid.
> 
> I'm assuming that would be a hardware raid..

You are assuming wrong.  It is software RAID, just like almost all on-board
RAID implementations (and most of the cheaper add-on RAID cards.)  RAID that
is supported in the BIOS have one advantage over other software
implementations, and that is that you can boot from all supported RAID
configurations, which is not always the case otherwise.


> 
> Would I be better off just using two disks and mirror them in software 
> raid (zpool) or using the Intel hardware-ish raid and then zfs the raid?
> 
> box has 2G of ram, and a pair of 250G sata 300 drives.
> 
> clues appreciated.

ZFS still feels a little bit too experimental for my own tastes (although
opinions differ on that matter), but apart from that ZFS is probably the
best solution.




-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se