> There’s a RAID card with 2GB cache and battery included. I can't speak for this particular card but, in the past, there were some HP RAID cards where you cou

> There’s a RAID card with 2GB cache and battery included. I can't speak for this particular card but, in the past, there were some HP RAID cards where you could not disable the RAID functionality if you wanted to. Assume that, for whatever reason (ZFS, perhaps?), you had a bunch of drives and you just wanted to use those drives normally -- that is, you wanted the OS to see the "raw" drives, individually. Sorry, too bad! You had two options: 1) create a bunch of one-disk RAID0 arrays (one per drive) and then let the OS use those (which isn't ideal in the ZFS case) or 2) buy a different card. Another common thing (when it comes to ZFS) is "cross-flashing" the firmware on RAID cards. Many of the RAID cards shipped by the various server manufacturers are often just re-branded LSI cards, with or without modifications to the firmware (besides just the re-branding). For example, you could take an IBM ServeRAID M5014 card (which is basically an LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i card with less cache) and flash it with the "original" firmware from LSI. The last I checked (which, admittedly, has been a while), it wasn't possible to do this with many of the most popular RAID cards that HP shipped. (This probably isn't an issue if you're buying servers for $work. In my case, I buy them for $home too.) At a previous job (at an .edu), we used HP server gear pretty extensively and, overall, I was quite happy with it. In the last 5-10 years, though, I've become "turned off" to pretty much anything from HP, though. --- Finally, there was the recently discovered issue with HPE SAS SSDs failing catastrophically [0]: > SSDs which were put into service at the same time will likely fail nearly simultaneously. Nothing like having every single drive in your ENTIRE array fail at (basically) the exact same time, huh? I feel bad for the department/team that discovered this issue the hard way! > ... results in SSD failure at 32,768 hours of operation ... I know what you're thinking: "32,768? That's one more than the maximum value of a --" Yep. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21637516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21637516