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We bought SuperMicro server "SUPERMICRO CSE-826E16-R1200PB" which will be used for storage.

Total HDD

10 - 4TB Seagate HDDs 2 - 60 GB SSDs

Now im planning to install FreeNAS on it . And i will install OS on SSD which will be RAID 1 . But i have problem deciding that should i use Hardware Raid Raid6 or ZFS based RaidZ2 .

Which will be good choise Hardware Raid or ZFS Based ?

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  • ZFS and hardware RAID often does not play well and you might lose the pool under certain circumstances. When using freenas don't use hardware RAID. Commented May 4, 2015 at 16:18

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Currently I can think of three advantages:

  1. ZFS has a 'self-healing' mechanism which only works if redundancy is performed by ZFS.
  2. ZFS has two tools (zpool and zfs) to manage devices, RAID, pools and filesystems from the Operating System level. This way you can easy replace devices (if they are hot swappable), manage new pools and so on.
  3. ZFS allows dynamic resizing (growth) of pools when the host is running. If you decide to add drives with hardware RAID you need to do that offline. Besides, ZFS allows you to replace existing disks with larger ones (if pool is build using RAID).
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    All true. With one disadvantage: entire load from ZFS operations (checksums, RAID, etc) is done by processor. With dedicated RAID controller all this will happen in the processor of the controller. And IMHO ZFS in FreeNAS is not ready for enterprise :) Commented May 4, 2015 at 12:59
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    @RomeoNinov It's true that all operations run on the main CPU. But I haven't seen a system that is CPU bound regarding the ZFS operations. All systems I've seen have always been network or IO bound (disk). “ZFS in FreeNAS is not ready for enterprise” → Do you have any resources backing up that claim? I've seen it successfully running in several enterprises and don't hesitate to recommend FreeNAS or TrueNAS to enterprises. Commented May 4, 2015 at 16:24
  • @Marco, If you check above in the questions you will see OP ask for 10 disk RAID, which IMHO can load the processor. About readiness - this is my humble opinion, the Oracle do lot of changes on ZFS after the moment FreeBSD adopt it from OpenSolaris Commented May 4, 2015 at 18:34
  • @Lambert So if i understand it clear. We can change the HDD in case of HDD failure (in HW Raid case) and pool will not become corrupt . And this method will work when system is offline . Am i right ? Commented May 5, 2015 at 7:18
  • @OmiPenguin, in most cases you can swap the HDD in case of a failing disk with hardware RAID. The controller handles a logical disk to the operating system and therefore the pool is 'unaware' of the underlying configuration. When replacing a hot swappable drive the controller is responsible for rebuilding the data onto the replaced disk. When the disks are hot swappable this will work when the system is online, taking the host offline is in that case not necessary. Commented May 5, 2015 at 18:28

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