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Do you need raid with ZFS?
A. It is strongly preferable to run ZFS straight to disk, and not make use of any form of RAID in between. Whether or not a system that effectively requires you make use of the RAID card precludes the use of ZFS has more to do with the OTHER benefits of ZFS than it does data resiliency.
Would you typically use a separate RAID system with ZFS Why or why not?
1 Answer. Yes, ZFS doesn’t need hardware raid and is actually better when used without it. It is able to provide partial data protection even with a single device when configured to use ditto blocks but of course won’t resist a full disk failure in that case.
What is the best RAID for a server?
RAID 5
RAID 5 is by far the most common RAID configuration for business servers and enterprise NAS devices. This RAID level provides better performance than mirroring as well as fault tolerance. With RAID 5, data and parity (which is additional data used for recovery) are striped across three or more disks.
Can you use ZFS on top of raid?
If you configure RAID on the hardware level and provide a logical disk, ZFS can be configured on top of it. But ZFS likes to see the independent disks/devices so you can benefit from the so called self healing capabilities.
Can you run ZFS on a striped disk?
You can just use individual disks. However, virtually 99% of people run ZFS for the RAID portion of it. You could just run your disks in striped mode, but that is a poor use of ZFS. Like other posters have said, ZFS wants to know a lot about the hardware.
Why is ZFS so paranoid about the hardware?
The idea with ZFS is to let it known as much as possible how the disks are behaving. Then, from worst to better: As ZFS is quite paranoid about hardware, the less hiding there is, the more it can cope with any hardware issues.
Can a T10 PI controller be used for ZFS?
You can use T10 PI capable controllers (that at least all LSI controllers that I used are) Majority of enterprise disks are T10 PI capable. So if it is appropriate for you, you can build T10 PI capable array, create ZFS pool without redundancy on top of it, and just make sure you follow the guidelines regarding to your use case in the article.