I'm looking at picking up an old Dell PowerEdge FS12-NV7 and it has two PERC 6/i's to give you the option of hooking up 12 drives to the machine. I know that this is a RAID controller but I don't want to run it in RAID. I'm going to be using ZFS through software so I want all the drives to show up individually as I don't want to run into any issues if the raid controller dies and I want to be able to gradually add drives to the system over time. Is there an option to do this? I've tried finding out the information but I can't see it.
Previous comment ~~Yes that controller should be fine. For ZFS you need a controller that can be set to JBOD mode, (Just a Bunch Of Disks), according to the Dell website that controller can be.~~
Some of the Pretty Expensive Ramshackle Crap (PERC) controllers require you to run a "proper" array before it will present a disk to the OS. It's really a toss up. I've got a PERC 6 that's not capable of JBOD. In order to use the drives for ZFS, I had to make an array of 1 drive, for each drive in the system. The 10K RPM SAS drives may as well have been desktop PATA drives at that point. Personally, I'd avoid PERC, even if it was free. Same with Dell in general, but it's hard to say no when a whole machine is sitting in your lap.