Hardware RAID or FreeNAS RAID ! ????

[wonders]

I'd like to know which one is better to use !

Hardware RAID 5 or FreeNAS RAID 5 in terms of data recovery and performance !!
btw Im running FreeNAS on our backup server in the datacenter ! so its quite important to have a good performance and high chance of data recovery !

Thanks

 

[matthewowen01]

long story short go with raidz, raid5 is beat on every metric.

well traditional RAID 5 has the write hole and raidz does not, ie if you loose power, you can loose data you were in the process of writing but with zfs you cannot.

zfs has checksums for everything so when you have an inconsistency, you know which is correct and which isn't. you don't have this with raid5.

zfs has a highly optimized caching scheme designed for it. raid5 has the cache of the controller which is designed for it, but this is many times smaller than the cache you'll have with zfs.

 

[SoftDux-Rudi]

ZFS is much better than RAID (especially RAID5) in just about every way :)
If you have an SSD disk for ZIL / L2ARC, then you'll have a killer setup.

 

[raulfg3]

ther are a lot of threads answer this question, only google a bit, some examples:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=226048
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=120815

 

[wonders]

Thanks guys, I used RAID-z but can I ask what if the whole system I mean motherboard crashes, how can I recover my data I mean rebuild the RAID, what shoudl I do in that care ?

 

[matthewowen01]

sure, there is no rebuild to do. connect the drives any way you want to in a new system, install an OS that supports zfs. then import the pool.

it's no big deal, all the important information is stored on each drive. you could even loose one of the drives in a horrible plane crash and you'd be fine as you have one drive of redundancy.

 

[wonders]

Cool, Thanks a lot