The open-zfs community has really found some really bad raid cards. Because of checksumming we can tell when data is corrupted. The card that are good are most of the lsi's. the 9211 for sata or I think it is 2308 for sas, use the version 18 of firmware, 19 and 20 have had problems.. but stating with lsi is a good choice. The freenas community recommends a IBM serverRAID M1015 flashed to the lsi 9211, you can get these on ebay really cheap. Alot of other cards can be used if on the freebsd 9.3 hardware compat list BUT, they have to be able to be used in jbod mode. The dell perc's have been a very very difficult to me over the years, but I just bought a new one to test the newer firmware versions, but i wouldn't recommend those. lk On 4/10/15 11:50 AM, Ryan Coleman wrote: > I looked at RAID 6 (but for ESXi) and with that I had an additional $1200 cost. > > I just purchased the SAS expander for my card and I’d rather not eat that (although $200 was far less than MSRP). > > So if I go FreeNAS I should only be limited to the RAID controllers that have FreeBSD support, right? > > The plan is to finish our off-site storage system, yes. The entire migration operation I’m working on will take months to complete so I have a little bit of time (and I have three RR2320s lying around) but I need to spend as little as possible at this point after dropping $2000 in drives last week. > >> On Apr 10, 2015, at 10:40 AM, Munir Nassar <nassarmu at gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I would (and have gone) the FreeNAS/zfs route.You do not want a RAID5 >> (or its ZFS equivalent RAID-Z) with drives of that size, RAID6/Z2 is >> better. If you can spare the cost, go RAID-X3. If possible i would get >> two servers so that you can have an offsite replica of the data, >> something easily done with FreeNAS. >> >> >> On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 11:59 PM, Ryan Coleman <ryan.coleman at cwis.biz> wrote: >>> 90 days and $17,000 later I have my 13TB array recovered. >>> >>> Thank goodness for business insurance! >>> >>> So I have the need to build a bigger, better, smarter storage system. Presently I’m looking at 16x3TB drives and a RAID 5 running in ESXi… But it’s time to consider alternatives… NAS, SAN, something. >>> >>> I’ve avoided ZFS talk for years because it never applied, and FreeNAS is definitely up my alley with 14 years FreeBSD experience - but what would you do? Primary function is long-term data storage but also serving up many network services as well as development projects. >>> >>> I have an LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i with a SAS expander and would be maxing out the 16 RAID drives for that if I go with a RAID but I really want knowledge on personal experiences with various NAS options. >>> >>> One requirement: Must be iSCSI capable with ESXi 5.5 (free license). ESXi machine is super-loaded (6 core Sandy bridge Xeon and 32GB) but was design for the future growth. >>> _______________________________________________ >>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -- Linda Kateley Kateley Company Skype ID-kateleyco http://kateleyco.com