I know this is a newbie question, but I am making an archive on our closed restricted unclassified network on a R710 old server. I need redundancy for this server but got a comment that said that ZFS doesn’t operate well with a hardware RAID. Can someone tell me how ZFS provides redundancy? I will be doi some research as well.
ZFS is software RAID (which all RAID solutions ultimately are…).
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Thank you very much for the reply. I will be reading into this to understand it better. Plan on moving ahead on my project on Wednesday. I appreciate your feedback.
You should also review ZFS features. Their are lots of gotchas that bite people new to ZFS, even if they have hardware RAID experience.
For example, ZFS supports something called a scrub. This checks all data, as well as any redundancy, (Mirror disks, RAID-Zx parity, “copies=2”, etc…). ZFS will check the data hash, (complex checksum), on any read. And if an error is found, use any redundancy available to restore the data. Then fix the faulty data disk blocks.
However, any data hanging around and not read regularly may get “bitrot”. Thus, a scrub that reads all the data, including any redundancy, can help prevent aging data, (on aging disks), from being lost.
Then their are snapshots that can help if ransomware tries to encrypt the data. And of course SMART tests.
There are some resources on ZFS configuration and pool layout;
Some more on the old forums that would be helpful too.
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