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[TinTIn]

Hi All,

Any thoughts or experience on using HW RAID controller to mirror the OS? I can't see anything inherently wrong with this so long as your storage disks aren't going through it. However I've had a couple of funnies with it over the last week or so, nothing major but sometimes they go out of sync normally during installation also had a new issue that I'm not sure what or who to blame.

Anyway thanks in advance.


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[SweetAndLow]

Probably not a good idea since the OS uses zfs as well. Any reason to not just use zfs mirror?

 

[TinTIn]

No reason really Sweet. The reseller of my kit said it was a no no and I was best to use HW so I went with their experience however I've not been 100% convinced with their knowledge so far.


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[SweetAndLow]

Well i don't think it would benefit you if you are using FreeNAS but any other OS would probably benifit. The reseller should have an opinion on how to configure it when using a variety of OS's and I think FreeBSD and zfs qualifies as an OS they should have a best practice for. Have you asked them there opinion with your specific use case in mind?

 

[TinTIn]

Yes. They said they have tested the ZFS mirrored OS drives and found it unreliable. However like I said I'm not 100% convinced they're not telly me a porky. They are clearly not experience in BSD and wanted me to use an iilumos variant from day one like openindi or omnios but in testing I've found FreeNAS to have the best feature set, it's the fastest for file transfer over SMB and it cheap (i.e. free) unlike Syneto or Nexenta.


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[SweetAndLow]

One other thing to keep in mind that might make freenas different than those other OS's including FreeBSD is that it is an appliance. The bit's of the OS never really change through normal usage. Not sure how this plays into there testing of hardware raided OS vs zfs mirroring but it seems important.

 

[TinTIn]

Thanks Sweet. I'll be doing a lot of testing over the next couple of months and I'll see how it goes.


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[cyberjock]

This is a very mixed bag. The short answer is "this is a bad idea". The long answer is that it's much less cut-and-dry than that.

There are advantages to mirroring via hardware RAID. One disk fails and the system will still boot without you having to change the bootloader and stuff. There's also disadvantages such as ZFS identifying corruption without the option to recover since there is no ZFS redundancy.

Honestly, I could easily argue either way is "better" as there are benefits and risks. Personally, I think the ZFS mirroring is the way to go (if its good enough for your data, why is it not good enough for your boot device?) and is pretty much the only config that is really supported here on the forums.

 

[TinTIn]

Thanks for the advice.


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