I'm convinced I need 3-disk RAID1 so I can lose 2 drives and keep running. I'd also like to stripe for performance, resulting in RAID10. It sounds like most hardware controllers do not support 6-disk RAID10 so ZFS looks very interesting.
Can I operate ZFS RAID without a hardware RAID controller? >From a RAID perspective only, is ZFS a better choice than conventional software RAID? ZFS seems to have many excellent features and I'd like to ease into them slowly (like an old man into a nice warm bath). Does ZFS allow you to set up additional features later (e.g. snapshots, encryption, deduplication, compression) or is some forethought required when first making the filesystem? It looks like there are comprehensive ZFS Gentoo docs (http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ZFS) but can anyone tell me from the real world about how much extra difficulty/complexity is added to installation and ongoing administration when choosing ZFS over ext4? Performance doesn't seem to be one of ZFS's strong points. Is it considered suitable for a high-performance server? http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM1NTA Besides performance, are there any drawbacks to ZFS compared to ext4? - Grant
