I agree to other comments. From the Day 1 ZFS is fine tuned for JBOD's. While Raid cards are welcome ZFS will perform better with JBOD's. Most of the Raid cards do have limited power and bandwith to support platter speeds of the newer drives. And ZFS code seems to be more intelligent for caching.
A few days a ago a customer tested a Sunfire X4500 connected to a network with 4 x 1 Gbit ethernets. X4500 have modest CPU power and do not use any Raid card. The unit easly performaed 400 MB/sec on write from LAN tests which clearly limited by the ethernet ports. Mertol Mertol Ozyoney Storage Practice - Sales Manager Sun Microsystems, TR Istanbul TR Phone +902123352200 Mobile +905339310752 Fax +902123352222 Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bob Friesenhahn Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 5:33 AM To: kevin williams Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] raid card vs zfs On Sun, 22 Jun 2008, kevin williams wrote: > > The article says that ZFS eliminates the need for a RAID card and is > faster because the striping is running on the main cpu rather than > an old chipset on a card. My question is, is this true? Can I Ditto what the other guys said. Since ZFS may generate more I/O traffic from the CPU, you will want an adaptor with lots of I/O ports. SATA/SAS with a port per drive is ideal. It is useful to have a NVRAM cache on the card if you will be serving NFS or running a database, although some vendors sell this NVRAM cache as a card which plugs into the backplane and uses a special driver. ZFS is memory-hungry so 4GB of RAM is a good starting point for a server. Make sure that your CPU and OS are able to run a 64-bit kernel. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
