RAID Controller Device and Best Practice

[chazelton]

New to FreeNAS but not NAS in general nor new to RAID or servers. Wondering what the best practice is as far as RAID is concerned.

Should I just let FreeNAS handle the simple mirrors or RAID 1's I'm doing or should I get a controller card. Let me know your personal experiences.

If I go RAID which card would be suggested. The HCL I saw seemed outdated. Suggest a card if anyone has had good success. Looking for moderate price range maybe Adaptec or something. 8 port etc.

Thanks in advance guys.

 

[survive]

Hi chazelton,

FreeNAS is pretty much set up to use ZFS as it's filesystem. If you are going to use that save yourself some bucks, don't get a RAID card, and use either the motherboard SATA controllers or get more ports with a SAS HBA....something like a nice LSI that you can flash with a target firmware that "dumbs" it down into a fast SAS\SATA controller. Take whatever you were going to spend on a controller and apply liberally to the rest of the components...be sure to get plenty of RAM.

I personally run an 8 drive raidz2 of Samsung 1TB drives on an LSI\IBM BR10i card and couldn't be happier. 8 ports on the card, 8 drive bays in the case. Ask me for details.

-Will

 

[chazelton]

O.K. perfect that is what I was thinking. Appreciate the feedback. When you say plenty of RAM is say 8GB enough or are you talking more. This is a large library.

 

[William Grzybowski]

ZFS usually recommends 1GB RAM for each 1TB of data