ZFS or UFS for 4TB hardware RAID6?

[Tom Worster]

On 7/16/09 6:12 PM, "Maxim Khitrov" <mkhitrov at gmail.com> wrote:

>> 
>> I'd love to hear about any test results you may get comparing software with
>> hardware raid.
> 
> I received the hardware yesterday. There was a last minute change due
> to cost. Instead of getting 4x 2TB drives I opted for 6x 1TB. This
> limits my future expansion a bit, but that may be a few years down the
> line. On the plus side, I can get the 4TB of RAID6 that I originally
> planned for and the performance should be better because of additional
> disks in the array.
> 
> Sometime next week I'll install FreeBSD 8 and will then be able to run
> a few benchmarks. After that I'll configure software RAID and repeat
> the process. Are there any specific tests that you guys would like me
> to run? Sequential read/write tests using dd are a given, beyond that
> I'm not familiar with any ports under benchmarks/, so if you know of
> anything good, tell me.

sorry, i can't help. i've never done any benchmarking.

if performance using zfs raid were good relative to using the dedicated raid
controller then the possibility of improving system availability by
eliminating that non-redundant sub-system might exist. unfortunately i don't
think the comparison makes sense, at least with sas, because all the
multi-port sas controller chips, iirc, are also raid controllers.