3 ms·

a hyped single vendor Who's that single vendor? FreeBSD, OpenIndiana, Joyent, Oracle? compared to a industry wide standard Good luck exchanging your fried RA

• aexaey 11y ago
  > Good luck exchanging your fried RAID controller for a "comparable" model If you are running Linux/*BSD/SmartOS, the best RAID controller is a JBOD controller, i.e. one that that exposes all connected disks as-is to the host OS, and than it would be in-kernel soft-RAID implementing the actual logic. This approach gives you a more predictable system with no vendor-specific idiosyncrasies or extra cache level to worry about (BBU in OP's article); you end up running RAID code that is peer-reviewed, fully integrated into fsync() algorithm, and surprisingly, often gives you better performance too. "True hardware RAID controllers", on the other hand, are nothing more than an application-specific computer with its own (non-upgradeable and often outdated) CPU, RAM, I/O and hard-to-upgrade proprietary software. And if you buy into the view described above, than replacing a JBOD controller for RAID use is exactly the same thing as replacing JBOD controller for ZFS use, by definition.