I have read numerous posts on this forum and fully understand the logic behind HBA over RC. I wish I knew this earlier though as I'm new to truenas and have not banked on this curve ball. Logistically it's impossible for me to flash the H710 Mini as it requires the removal of the RAID battery, and I am about 1000km away from the server. I could ask the DC team to perform this, but as they are supposed to look after the hardware after my non-vendor flash, I am left with no choice apart from returning to a Ubuntu OS and normal NFS share or taking the risk and running with a raid controller.
From my understanding the problems are:
1) TrueNas / ZFS cannot access the individual drives, making smart monitoring "impossible"
2) ZFS already performs most of the raid repairs / better raid features than what the card has so why stick with the outdated technology
3) If the controller dies, there will be data loss whereas ZFS is better equipt in handling this process.
4) Performance impact
5) ZFS may "overrun" the raid controller (something like caching)
For our use case, the 2 servers we want to setup with Truenas is 2 R720DX's which is repurposed now as backup storage, so we're not running critical / production data. I also want to test the replication task and run a handful of non-critical vm's on it.
I assume I am not the only person in this position so want to find out if there are others that have still opted running with the RAID controller knowing the drawbacks? There are some of the problems above that I feel can be resolved through IDRAC / custom smartmontools script to scan individual drives with megaraid,x (we already do this on our hypervisors), so is this considered a total "no go" or are there people doing this and what have been your experiences so far?
I am "in it to win it" at the moment so will test on my side as well. As this is our first round with Truenas, I will ensure our next NAS setup will be equip correctly :)
From my understanding the problems are:
1) TrueNas / ZFS cannot access the individual drives, making smart monitoring "impossible"
2) ZFS already performs most of the raid repairs / better raid features than what the card has so why stick with the outdated technology
3) If the controller dies, there will be data loss whereas ZFS is better equipt in handling this process.
4) Performance impact
5) ZFS may "overrun" the raid controller (something like caching)
For our use case, the 2 servers we want to setup with Truenas is 2 R720DX's which is repurposed now as backup storage, so we're not running critical / production data. I also want to test the replication task and run a handful of non-critical vm's on it.
I assume I am not the only person in this position so want to find out if there are others that have still opted running with the RAID controller knowing the drawbacks? There are some of the problems above that I feel can be resolved through IDRAC / custom smartmontools script to scan individual drives with megaraid,x (we already do this on our hypervisors), so is this considered a total "no go" or are there people doing this and what have been your experiences so far?
I am "in it to win it" at the moment so will test on my side as well. As this is our first round with Truenas, I will ensure our next NAS setup will be equip correctly :)