So. Just got a killer deal on a new-to-me Dl360 g7.
2x [email protected], 128gb of ram, smart array p822 hardware controller for external with working battery and 512m cache, smart array p410i with battery and 128m cache controlling 2x 80g 15k plus 6x 380g 10k. Also came with a d2700 25x 2.5" multi channel sas with redundant controllers, no drives, all for 400 bucks. All it’s missing is an advanced ilo license. Already planning on populating that 2700 with ssds in the near future. Boyfriend’s opinion be damned, I couldn’t not do it. Currently have it running xenserver with a few vms and it’s fantastic, minus the noise.
Currently my main storage is my freenas box, 32g unregistered ecc of ram on an fx 8320, 2x lsi 9211-8i, 2x 120g ssd for zil/l2, 10x 3tb hgst enterprise drives, redundant psu. The thing works phenomenally well but I desperately need to expand it, but can’t due to ram limitations.
I have been looking around and I found d2600 DAS units on ebay with 12x 4tb drives for around $1k. Or, I could get just the 2600 with sleds for around 400. Or both, moving those disks in the nas in to the new server and migrating everything in to one host,
decommissioning the old trusty nas (which BTW is the direction I am leaning, mainly for power efficiency and heat reasons).
I’ve always loved zfs. It has never steered me wrong. it’s incredibly resilient and has kept my data safe even through disasters for many years. With hardware raid I’ve always had a mixed bag of success. I’ve seen so many simple things happen to hardware arrays that left them for dead, weather that be the controller dying, the controller randomly forgetting its array configuration, controller failing to alert on drive failure/predictive failure, simple array migrations/controller replacements, etc, all things that my zfs arrays, both personal and for clients, have lived through and survived. This has left me with a bad taste in my mouth for hardware raid, especially for large sets of disks. Really the only thing that zfs has against it imo is its ram requirement.
Now, I totally get that the controller I have in this hp server is an absolute beast, but with my bad experiences on hardware raid I am really tempted to sell that controller and get an hba to control some of these DAS units, just passing the hba to a freenas guest and going with something I’m more comfortable with. That said I wanted to reach out and get opinions on this path, whether or not my HW raid fears are unfounded, or if there’s a benefit I’m not seeing.
What do you guys n gals think, should I go and swap this beast controller with an hba or should I save that RAM and stick with the hardware controller?