What if your HW-RAID-controller dies? in say 2 years or more.. What will read your disks as a configured RAID? Do you know how to (re)configure the controller or restore the config without destroying your data? Do you know for sure that a spare-part and firmware will be identical, or at least compatible? How good is your service subscription? Maybe only scrapyards and museums will have what you had. =o With ZFS/JBOD you will be safe; just get a new controller (or server) -- any kind that is protocol-compatible (and OS-complatible) you may have floating around (SATA2 | SCSI | FC..) -- and zpool import :) And you can safely buy the latest&gratest and come out with something better than you had.
With ZFS I prefer JBOD. For performance you may want external HW-RAIDs (>=2) and let ZFS mirror them as virtual JBOD. -- depends where the bottleneck is; I/O or spindle. I disable any RAID-features on internal RAID-chipsets (nForce etc.). This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss