Once freenas was installed and setup with the software raidzfs setup, i was seeing again 5060mbs file system. Windows software raid vs hardware raid ars technica. A raid can be deployed using both software and hardware. I guess, there are even workloadscircumstances which might lead me to deploy a hardware controller zfs needs a certain level of knowledge, cant demand this from every customer. Differences between hardware raid, hbas, and software raid. It uses hardware raid controller card that handles the raid tasks transparently to the operating system. Windows home server v1s drive extender was not a raid 1 implementation, but it utilize the cpu to make stored data. The number of sockets is determined by physical raid controller. A new raid variant would have the iops of raid 5, and an even greater dynamism in the stripe layout than raid z. Generally speaking, raid has socket limitation except for software raid. Aug 15, 2006 over at home opensolaris forums zfs discuss robert milkowski has posted some promising test results hard vs. Soft possibly the longest running battle in raid circles is which is faster, hardware raid or software raid. Jul 07, 2009 a redundant array of inexpensive disks raid allows high levels of storage reliability.
Jan 10, 2017 zfs changes the computer into a bigger and better raid system than a hardware raid card can provide. A brief history of raid raid has been around since 1970s 1989 berkeley paper was a taxonomy 1989 witnessed the first raid5 in software 1990s saw many hardware raid3, 5s lsi, 3ware, maxstrat, highpoint, intel 1990s also saw the introduction of raidframe mdraid came along in 2001. Lets start the hardware vs software raid battle with the hardware side. Hardware raid and software raid are both important storage tools that we use with our systems. However, there is no hardware controller implementing raidz. Software hardware raid 1 as previously mentioned doesnt matter. The first is just get a sata controller for that machine and keep going as is, since its software raided through windows storage spaces. Softwarehardware raid 1 as previously mentioned doesnt matter. So upgrades and handling failures becomes trivial since the software controller can come with you to the new hardware. The servers used in these tests are quite old and relatively slow. Nov 15, 2019 this raid technology comes in three flavors. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a special raid controller inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard.
I have been building servers with both software and hardware raid and have used lsi, adaptec, areca, dell, hp, intel and 3ware raid cards over the years. Dec 10, 2018 ive gone completely away from hardware raid. Apr 05, 2019 favoring hardware raid over software raid comes from a time when hardware was just not powerful enough to handle software raid processing, along with all the other tasks that it was being used for. The more interesting option is to use some of my old hardware lying around to put together a storage machine either using a hardware raid controller or sata controller using zfs for raid 10 or whatever the zfs equivalent is. A question often asked in the server industry is, whats better. Which is best, hardware raid, vs software raid, vs zfs xigmanas. Mar 14, 2019 difference between software raid and hardware raid in high level is presented in this video session. This is also true for many hardwarebased raid solutions. Zfs has its own names for its software raid implementations.
How good is a zfs raid 50s performance in comparison with. Since these controllers dont do jbod my plan was to break the drives into 2 pairs, 6 on each controller and create the raid 1 pairs on the hardware raid controllers. Damn mainboard died on me and now i cant find the right controller for the disks anymore so the new mainboard and 4500gb is currently running software raid5. Hardware raid handles its arrays independently from the host and it still presents the host with a single disk per raid array. If you are considering raid 5 youll want to lean more heavily towards zfs software raid vs.
Using hardware raid in addition not only does not make things better, it makes things worse with extra unnecessary hardware and software layers between zfs and the drives. Jun, 2016 comparing hardware raid vs software raid setups deals with how the storage drives in a raid array connect to the motherboard in a server or pc, and the management of those drives. Which is why i like hardware raid 10 and software parity raid with zfs on top either way. As for the hardware vs software raid question, adaptec raid cards are good at what they do. Imho, im a big fan of kernel developers non directly related to zfs, so i really prefere mdadm to hardware raid. Still sitting on the fence with software raid, zfs certainly seems impressive but still has licensing issues on linux. They are functionally identical to normal raid levels, with the only minor differences coming from zfs s increased resiliency due to the nature of its architecture. But you can use the lvm and fs features on top of hardware raid perfectly well too. Zfs software raid part iii this time i wanted to test softare raid10 vs. Today we dive into what the differences are and whe we choose them. Difference between software raid and hardware raid in high level is presented in this video session. The idea with zfs is to let it known as much as possible how the disks are behaving. Zfs works around write hole by embracing the complexity.
The zfs file system allows you to configure different raid levels such as raid 0, 1, 10, 5, 6. I still have a few disks still lying around, used to be in a hardware raid set. Generally speaking, operating system treats raid as one disk. If anything they should be advised to increase ram and be done with it. Hardware raid 1 is more likely to experience readmodifywrite overhead from partial sector writes and hardware raid 56 will almost certainty suffer from partial stripe writes i. Back then, the solution was to use a hardware raid card with a builtin processor that handled the raid calculations offline. For example, with zfs you could create a raid0 using two or more raidz pools. Common incarnations of software raid would include the oracle sun zfs, linuxs mdadm, flexraid, drobo beyondraid, lime technologys unraid, windows dynamic disk based raid functionality, netapps raid dp, and etc. In the case of raid hardware where we dont have the option to expose the disks directly, we prefer to create raid 0 volumes on each disk and give them to zfs. Before raid was raid, software disk mirroring raid 1 was a huge profit generator for system vendors, who sold it as an addon to their operating systems. In conclusion, i feel better with not using hardware raid. Zfs vs hardware raid system, part ii this post will focus on other differences between a zfs based software raid and a hardware raid system that could be important for the usage as gridpp storage backend.
Zfs is scalable, and includes extensive protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, efficient data compression, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copyonwrite clones, continuous integrity checking and. They are functionally identical to normal raid levels, with the only minor differences coming from zfss increased resiliency due to the nature of its architecture. Using zfs with the disks directly will allow it to obtain the sector size information reported by the disks to avoid readmodifywrite on. Disks are directly attached using the sata ports on the motherboard.
Nov 04, 2010 the zfs file system allows you to configure different raid levels such as raid 0, 1, 10, 5, 6. In the case of raid hardware where we dont have the option to expose the disks directly, we prefer to create raid0 volumes on each disk and give them to zfs. Zfs is also much faster at raidz that windows is at software raid5. Aug 28, 2017 hardware raid and software raid are both important storage tools that we use with our systems. Software raid is a type of raid implementation that utilizes operating systembased capabilities to construct and deliver raid services. Hardware raid controllers mitigate the write hole problem by using battery backup. You have a lowly d525 at your disposal, which is a decent enough little cpu for serving media etc, but its not going to win you any medals performing lots of xor calcs, so offloading that to a hardware solution such as an adaptec card is prolly a good idea. Whether software raid vs hardware raid is the one for you depends on what you need to do and how much you want to pay. A redundant array of inexpensive disks raid allows high levels of storage reliability. This would give me 2gb of cache from the controller 1gb per 3 raid 1 groupings and then use zfs to create the striping groups. Mar 22, 2016 zfs vs hardware raid due to the need of upgrading our storage space and the fact that we have in our machines 2 raid controllers, one for the internal disks and one for the external disks, the possibility to use a software raid instead of a traditional hardware based raid was tested.
Also, with a hardware raid solution, the raid controller becomes a singlepointoffailure. For this test, i arranged two quite old hp dl380 g2 2x 1. So, if the disks in hardware raid have different capacities. This essentially a jbod configuration no raid performed by the card, and in this case should perform about the same as the. Comparing hardware raid vs software raid setups deals with how the storage drives in a raid array connect to the motherboard in a server or pc, and the management of those drives. If you want to set the controller to ahci, be aware it will affect your windows install. A hardware raid controller configured for raid 1, presenting a single volume to the os, with zfs only seeing it as a single disk. Nov 17, 2010 raid z performed slightly better there. Due to the need of upgrading our storage space and the fact that we have in our machines 2 raid controllers, one for the. It is used to improve disk io performance and reliability of your server or workstation. Raid 1 vs backup and software raid 1 vs hardware raid 1.
I manage all my bulk storage using zfs similar to storage spaces, and it. Again if your only desire to use zfs is an improvement in data resiliency, and your chosen hardware platform requires a raid card provide a single lun to zfs or multiple luns, but you have zfs stripe across them, then youre doing nothing to improve data resiliency and thus your choice of zfs may not be appropriate. For example, with zfs you could create a raid0 using two or more raid z pools. Before raid was raid, software disk mirroring raid 1 was a huge profit generator for system vendors, who sold it as an addon to their.
This is also true for many hardware based raid solutions. Zfs best practices with hardware raid server fault. Hardware raid strongly discouraged ixsystems community. Raid 1 vs backup and software raid 1 vs hardware raid 1 h. The two disks are then combined into a software raid 1 using. Nov 11, 2016 in conclusion, i feel better with not using hardware raid. As i had nothing to loose, i scrapped that setup and went back to my original hardware plan and remounted etc and was then seeing 95105mbs at the file system seeing about 510% cpu usage during readwrite. This article outlines what every relevant raid level does, and what its equivalent would be inside zfs. Favoring hardware raid over software raid comes from a time when hardware was just not powerful enough to handle software raid processing, along with all the other tasks that it was being used for. Hardware raid will cost more, but it will also be free of software raid s. Just a note, lsi 2208 is a highend hardware raid controller. That is what the thread was about, mainly, will raid 1 benefit enough to justify the extra risk and investment for a hw controller. Apr 14, 2015 once freenas was installed and setup with the software raid zfs setup, i was seeing again 5060mbs file system. While battery power protects against power outage, os or firmware crash is no less damaging.
This way itll be able to manage its own queues and parallelize the io better. In this post, i want to test the raid 10 performance of zfs against the performance with the hp raid controller also in a raid 10 configuration over 4 disks. This is ideal for home users because you can expand as you need. Thisd then be set up as a network share for a remote jirabitbucket store, and also vm storage for my xen boxes. Jul 04, 2019 hardware raid controllers mitigate the write hole problem by using battery backup. Zfs changes the computer into a bigger and better raid system than a hardware raid card can provide. I was initially considering a zfs software raid but after reading the minimum requirements it does not sound like zfs will be able to saturate a gigabit line with an amd e450 processor 1. Zfs is the best parity raid implementation on the planet and when we state the horror numbers for raid 5 we do it assuming zfs so that no one can dispute the numbers and if you run anything besides zfs for parity raid the risks actually. On native platforms not linux solaris is faster that ntfs. Again, the flexibility of zfs is a real advantage over the hardware raid controller. Windows software raid vs hardware raid 10 posts arlesterc. To understand why using zfs may cost you extra money, we will dig a little bit into zfs.
Common incarnations of software raid would include the oracle sun zfs, linuxs mdadm, flexraid, drobo beyondraid, lime technologys unraid, windows dynamic disk basedraid functionality, netapps raiddp, and etc. Using hardware raid in addition not only does not make things better, it makes things worse with extra unnecessary hardware and software layers between zfs. In a hardware raid setup, the drives connect to a raid controller card inserted in a fast pciexpress pcie slot in a motherboard. Zfs equally as mobile between solaris, opensolaris, freebsd, osx, and linux under fuse. I used x4100 server with dualported 4gb qlogic hba directly connected to emc clariion cx340 array both links, each link connected to different storage processor. Zfs has two tools zpool and zfs to manage devices, raid, pools and filesystems from the operating system level. Software raid can never be faster it is at best as fast for stupid raid types, like striping than hardware raid unless those who implemented the hardware raid were a bunch of rabid chimps on acid. Zfs vs hardware raid due to the need of upgrading our storage space and the fact that we have in our machines 2 raid controllers, one for the internal disks and one for the external disks, the possibility to use a software raid instead of a. A hardware raid controller configured for two raid 0s. Over at home opensolaris forums zfs discuss robert milkowski has posted some promising test results hard vs. An important piece of that puzzle was eliminating the expensive raid card used in traditional storage and replacing it with high performance, software raid. Mar 06, 2018 it can either be performed in the host servers cpu software raid, or in an external cpu hardware raid. Other software raid solutions like linux mdadm lets you grow an existing raid array with one disk at a time.
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