Hardware Compatibility

[Teeravee Sirinapasawasdee]

Hi,

I'm new to FreeNAS and would like all of you in this community help suggest me for following questions:
1. What is difference between hardware RAID-6 and software RAIDZ1 and RAIDZ2? What is the prefer or factor to evaluate the selection?
2. Below is the unverified hardware list on my new server, are there any incompatibility with FreeNAS 8.0.4?
2.1 LSI 2108 SAS 6 Gbps Controller, with RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60, 8-in
2.2 Intel ICH10R SATA 3.0Gbps Controller; RAID 0, 1, 5, 10

Feel free to suggest on links or something that I need to read. ^^

Cheers,
Pound

 

[noplease]

Hi,

maybe you'll find a kind of 'first aid' here...:
http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Requirements

Please let us know what kind of usage is intended in which environment. There is no single answer to all.
Are we talking about a NASbox for home/soho use or do you project system to serve and back up a regional medical center?
Is it more about millions of very small portions being written and read all day long or about some large files backing up five clients daily or weekly?
Tell us more please! ;)

If you really intend to use hardware RAID (or even RAID controllers with non-raided disks) you should carefully decide even which disks to use as reliability and integrity both do partly depend on the right choice. RAID controllers often are a bit picky with disk behaviour even when configured to JBOD.
You'll find some more info following the link above and when doing some search in the forum.

noplease

 

[Teeravee Sirinapasawasdee]

Thank you for your reply, noplease.

Actually, this storage will be used to keep video files for public video streaming. The server is Wowza running on Xserve, Mac OS X Server 10.6 and I plan to connect to server via NFS. Another task of this storage will be shared storage for vSphere 4.1 cloud which will be connected via iSCSI.

For the RAID, I am not sure that this environment can gain benefits from ZFS or not. If yes, it would be good to use RAIDZ2 instead of RAID hardware which can save my money to invest on the storage. Any idea you can share. :D

 

[survive]

H Teeravee,

FreeNAS is pretty much designed to use ZFS as it's filesystem so if you do decide to go with ZFS please save yourself some time & money and get a plain old "dumb" controller card. Use the money you save on the card to beef up the memory in the server & get a quality supported UPS (if you don't have one already).

-Will

 

[noplease]

@Teeravee

I agree with Will.

Your challenge is to decide what would be the best disk strategy to combine the demanded bandwidth for large file video streaming with the supposedly higher amount of small to medium data packets being written and read by vSphere.
Depending on the total load expected, network bandwidth, the amount of simultaneous use and number of clients you could be better off setting up two systems. The first one optimized for fast reading with simple redundancy and occasional backups as I'm pretty sure the videos don't change too often. The second optimized for a fairly high r/w load with small to medium amount of data with increased local redundancy by a fault tolerant (ZFS) soft-RAID variant preferably completed with backups/snapshots to a different location. Thus vSphere-machines don't clutter your media streaming and various on demand videos don't tear down your vSphere storage bandwidth/response time too much (given the network delivers enough for both).

You answered just 13 minutes after I had posted... am I right suggesting you didn't use these 13 minutes to read all this docu stuff (link in #2) before?
Let me encourage you once again to read it because it contains a lot of answers for you and additional links to go in depth if necessary or of interest - especially concerning controllers, ZFS and RAID. Using the additional links in the documentation can really make your day. ;)