I haven't been following this thread closely, but some of them have left
me puzzled.
1. Hardware RAID: other than Rocket RAID, who don't seem to support a card
more than about 3 years (i used to have to update and rebuild the
drivers), anything LSI based, which includes Dell PERC, have been pretty
good. The newer models do even better at doing the right thing.
2. ZFS seems to be ok, though we were testing it with an Ubuntu system
just a month or so ago. Note: ZFS with a zpoolZ2 - the equivalent of RAID
6, which we set up using the LSI card set to JBOD - took about 3 days and
8 hours for backing up a large project, while the same o/s, but with xfs
on an LSI-hardware RAID 6, took about 10 hours less. Hardware RAID is
faster.
3. Being in the middle of going through three days of hourly logs and the
loghost reports, and other stuff, from the weekend (> 600 emails), I noted
that we have something like 50 mdraids, and we've had very little trouble
with them, almost all are either RAID 1 or RAID 6 (we may have a RAID 5
left), except for the system that had a h/d fail, and another starting to
through errors (I suspect the server itself...). The biggest issue for me
is that when one fails, "identify" rarely works, which means use smartctl
or MegaCli64 (or the lsi script) to find the s/n of the drive, then
guess... and if that doesn't work, bring the system down to find the right
bloody bad drive. But... they rebuild, no problems.
Oh, and I have my own workstation at home on a mdraid 1.
mark