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I have a RAIDdeluxe storage from RDL family with 42 HDDs inside that is connected to the Seupermicro server with FreeNAS installed on it. FreeNAS server has MegaRAID SAS 9380-8e card.

I've read FreeNAS: A Worst Practices Guide for the FreeNAS and really don't want to end up there.

I'm doing this for the first time and would be very grateful if you guys could share some of your experiences with me and point me on how to proceed with RAID configuration. Should I use ZFS?

My goal is to configure two RAID6 Volume sets and make the shares available on the local network.

Sylca
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  • Two 21-drive RAID6 volumes? That's way too large. In general, anything more than 10 drives for RAID6 is too much. And for performance reasons, it's often better to build RAID5/6 arrays out of a power-of-two number of data disks, then, if you can, set the RAID stripe size to something that fits your I/O patterns - and note that bigger is **NOT** usually better here. – Andrew Henle Feb 08 '17 at 10:26

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If you are going to use ZFS you should set your controllers in JBOD mode and let freenas configure raid-z2.

  • Do not use hardware raid and ZFS.
  • Get as much ram as possible

Basically install freenas on a usb thumb drive, configure MegaRAID as JBOD or non-raid, import the drives into freenas and setup Raid-Z2 (2 drive failures). There's plenty of guides and documentation out there but I'd recommend listening to a few of of techsnap or bsdnow podcasts referencing freenas.

Side thought: If you want to use hardware raid, use CentOS7 with LVM instead, do not partition the device, create an OS drive and then pvcreate /dev/sdX where X is your data volume.

Jacob Evans
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  • *Do not use hardware raid and ZFS.* Such blanket statements are based on **ZFS shiny!** "logic" that ignores the reality that high-end hardware RAID often provides advantages including better performance, much easier disk replacement, and even in some cases equivalent data protection. Know what your requirements are, know what your hardware is capable of doing, and make an *informed* decision how to implement a solution and ignore proclamations based on "building your own" on low-end commodity hardware that aren't applicable to higher-end RAID systems and enterprise-grade storage. – Andrew Henle Feb 08 '17 at 10:22