HP Smart Array P800 + MSA70 + ZFS

[Daffy]

Hello,
I'm thinking about the best way to configure my hardware for use with Freenas.
The storage controller is a HP Smart Array P800 and the storage is an MSA70 with 25x72Gb SAS drives.
I've been reading about bit rot, and figured that ZFS seems to be the way to go, but am uncertain about how to manage the system.
As far as I know the storage controller doesn't have the ability to show the raw hard drives as JBOD, so people seem to create raid0 volumes for each drive and use those volumes as "drives" for ZFS. What if a drive (==volume) would fail? I'm guessing that if I go into the raid card bios and remove the failed volume and create a new one with a new drive, ZFS will still be looking for the old configured hardware and won't find the newly created volume as an available replacement drive?

Basically my question is how to manage/monitor/replace multiple drives on HP Smart Array controllers.

(..Or maybe you have other suggestions about how to setup the raids on my hardware?)

Best regards,

 

[russell.smithies]

We're using an MDS600s with 70 x 2TB disks and a P411 controller with 512M flash-back cache. We set the array as a single RAID 10 partition and created a single ZFS volume out of it. No problems so far but because it's FreeBSD you can't run any of HPs diagnostics (so there's no support from HP) and there are no alerts for failed disks. We've only had one fail so far and that was detected by regularly looking for red lights. We just pulled the dud disk and replaced it and it rebuilt automatically without any data or proformance loss.
I also have an older MDS600 with only 35 x 1TB disks to add soon but that should be a fairly trivial task.


--Russell Smithies