Hardware Raid and ZFS configuration... Is this bad?

[natelabo]

So my current NAS setup is as follows:

Supermicro 16 Drive case with built in SAS expander - 836E1
Supermicro Server Board, Dual XEON's , 8GB Ram, Dual Nic's
Dual Power supplies
LSI Megaraid 9260-4i
9 - Seagate 3TB Drives

Currently I have the hardware raid configured as...
2 - 4 Drive Raid 10 Mirrors
1 - Hot Spare

In FreeNAS I have the two mirrors setup as one ZFS ?pool/volume? (Not sure if that is the right word) But basically I one storage unit of almost 12TB. My hardware raid card is not able to deliver the drives as JBOD. Nor do I really care because I just haven't been sold on the ZFS thing completely managing my Raid configuration. Especially considering the FreeNAS GUI is just not up to par to handle drive swaps or problems. (IMHO) This is giving me decent performance and I have not had any issues regarding stability. This is currently in testing stage...

Given my hardware is this how you would configure things? I will be setting up another system exactly the same to handle HA and clustering. Does this appear redundant enough to handle critical business data etc? Would you configure the data pools differently and why? Thanks for any input....

 

[cypher1024]

From what you've said, it sounds like you've striped the two RAID10 arrays, effectively making a RAID100 :)

If you do decide to switch to a pure ZFS setup, I would very stongly caution against using JBOD to concatenate any of your disks before letting ZFS at them. It would severely limit your configuration options and if one disk goes bad, you'd have to replace it and then resilver the entire JBOD, instead of a single disk. A much better way to do it would be an 8-disk RAIDZ2 (double-parity) vdev with a hot spare.