ZFS goes one further and even offers what we call "RAID 7", which is unofficial, but is to RAID 6 what RAID 6 is to RAID 5. Few people implement anything but RAID 5 in the SMB to save money, but RAID 6 is pretty much always there as an option, even if only in software. RAID 6 has been in the SMB market since I was first learning RAID in the 90s. With all things being equal raid-6 is better than the dreaded raid-5 with some limitations.īut aren't you using ZFS for that? Like I said above, you don't want to risk parity RAID with the hardware controller, most likely, as hardware parity RAID is far more risky than ZFS' implementation which is the absolute best on the market. It may have been available before that, I just wasn't aware of it. To my knowledge raid 6 appeared in the SMB market within the last 2-3 years. Neither of these OEM raid controllers support raid-6. I don't follow, how does age change the RAID options? Raid-6 is not an option since this test server is a few years old. I've got the base system setup, now I just have to deal with the disk array. The last time I used FreeNAS was back in the v5 days.
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I haven't use ZFS before so I'm unsure of its capabilities other than it is a software raid. This is a stop gap solution for just 60 days, the client doesn't want to spend a lot on hardware that will be discarded later. It's not clear if FreeNAS will know what to do with this failure is in question. I know both the Dell and IBM raid controllers will report a failed JBOD disk to the OS. FreeNAS looks like a simple and quick solution to get a NAS box up and running in just a few hours. My current circumstances are I have either a Dell 2950 or IBM x3650 and an HP Storage work shelf with 8 - 300 GB scsi disks, the need to reach 1.8 TB (2.5 TB for a little room) of storage somehow with this mix, and a tight time constraint. John, John and I always did the warnings assuming "best case" and any divergence from that would be even more dangerous :)ĭo you want the ease of hardware RAID blind swapping?ĭo you know ZFS well enough to be comfortable with it?ĭoes your hardware RAID pass through the necessary disk alerts so that the OS can deal with the disks or will they be silenced by the RAID controller leaving ZFS blind to failing disks?ĭo you want to give up the cache and computing power of the RAID card? ZFS, for example, addresses the dangerous RAID 5 "write hole" that your hardware controller does not.ĭAC, to the best of my knowledge, has never been experiences with ZFS either.īut all warnings about RAID 5 continue, people often assume (because they are reverse rationalizing RAID 5) that we've not taken ZFS into account when stating how dangerous RAID 5 is, but that is not the case. ZFS is the best parity RAID implementation on the planet and when we state the horror numbers for RAID 5 we do it assuming ZFS (so that no one can dispute the numbers) and if you run anything besides ZFS for parity RAID the risks actually increase. If you are considering RAID 5 you'll want to lean more heavily towards ZFS software RAID vs. We’ve been told it will take them between 30-45 days to source and build a new NAS server, so whatever solution we put in place it will need to run for at least 60 days.
So performance (IOP) and data resiliency is important with this NAS setup. Our client is using their NAS server to store 8 executing VM client images as well as Veeam snapshots. I would just order more disks for our server, but I need to get this system setup today so it can be placed in service overnight. Is a ZFS array really that good?ģ) Cannibalize 2 of the Dell T3400 Precision workstations in the test lab to make one system with 5 - 1 TB SATA disks with ZFS to create the required storage array. I’ve always tried to stay away from software raid. Since this final array will be about 2.5 TB I’m concerned, but not as much as if it was a 10 TB array.Ģ) Don't use the raid functions of external controller but use the ZFS software raid that is available in FreeNAS against disks connected to the raid controller (JBOD). To get the storage space they require I’ll have to break this raid-10 array and do something different.ġ) Build a raid-5 array (yeah I know) with enough storage space. We have our test server setup in a raid-10 configuration. Our system is setup with about 60% of the storage they need. Their NAS server died and we agreed to loan one of ours from the test lab.
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