I want my next FreeNAS build to serve as iSCSI storage for ESXi VMs- I’ve read that conventional RAID striping such as RAID 10 is better for performance that ZFS (RAIDZ) for this use-case. How dramatic is the performance desparity with typical “regular” RPM consumer 2TB HDDs? If we are talking miliseconds I might like the redudancy of staying ZFS, but if its annoyingly laggy, I suppose I would avoid ZFS. Or is there were vdevs come in?
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RAID 10 is definitely faster than RAIDZ, but you can have RAID 10 equivalent in ZFS.
There are performance concessions to any COW filesystem, but if you have enough RAM to throw at ZFS, it could be effectively faster than the hardware RAID.
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