Need suggestions for solutions to the raid file server

[AMISH]

I have tested a number of times and had raid solutions in the past but I feel that I will never be satisfied. I have 6 1.5TB drives. Now it is set up in RAID 5 on a Dell PERC 5/i controller, which works ok in Windows Server 1908. But everything gets little pci-e ports shown I will expand with time. I have tested the software raid 5 in Freenet, everything went fine, except again Freenet was incredibly slow speed over samba. (30MB/s) even with tweaking. Freenet with raidz, that was not full so well. Solaris 10 with raidz was also not good, which went all the OS to hell by one or another reason, even though I had not gone in the host server for several days. So the thing is that I need a future solution. This should then support up to 20 drives in the raid. Raidz (1/2) Or RAID5-6. I have seen little of the HP's sas expander, looks okay on, but this raid controller in the form of the HW raid is expensive! Then I have only seen Areca models, since these will be very good according to those who have tested or they have. But what kind of raid controller need for ZFS, as the drives are running in JBOD and RAID via the OS. Is probably not great joke to put a lot of money in a controller with a lot of cache memory since it is a solo drive in JBOD? Actually, I just left this to you and others who all are interested to generate ideas that can help me and others who are looking for solutions and opportunities. When the host had good suggestions for OS, RAID controller and RAID level.

[Amie]

You should have ZFS, if you need a SAS HBA to use HP SAS expander. It is not all HBA supporting expand shoulder from HP, but there are some cards that works (and does not work).

LSI SAS 9211-4i , 9211-8i : YES (dual linking supported on 9211-8i model)
LSI SAS3081E-R : YES
Intel SASUC8I (cross-flashed to LSI 1068e firmware): YES
Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 : YES
SuperMicro AOC-USAS-L8i: YES
Areca ARC-1300-4X : YES (Not recommended due to mediocre performance and no SMART passthrough)

With ZFS you can not expand a raidz with new disks. You can only add more vdevs in a pool, or replace all the disks in a vdev one and one with larger disks, and expand that way. With a raidz (1 parity) means a minimum of 3 drives. If you had plans to later expand with 1 and 1 disk, from 8 to 20 disks, a hardware controller (or any other "software raid" than ZFS) is something you must consider. There is no need to save money to buy a cheap HBA today, if you can not afford to buy in bulk disk later when you need to add more disk space. For example, for my vdevs (raidz2) of 8 disks each, I have to buy 8 pieces of disk at a time. It is possible I want to make it to 10 drives, but I have not decided yet. You must be aware of the choices you make today because it will influence what kind of options you can / must take in the future, and also make their own investigations, search for and read information from manufacturers and experiences others have experienced. It is important to note that the day you experience problems, it is yourself that must take place and even perform the correction. You can ask for help, but it is not sure there are people who can (or bother) to respond at any time. If you think that ZFS is the way to go forward, I recommend reading the Oracle Solaris ZFS Administration Guide, and ZFS Best Practices Guide.

[AMISH]

This was an excellent explanation and had a lots of useful information! But I did not got the reason why you have to expand it with a raidz as you said; and alright again it does not cost as much as anything gets GB, but by 6-10 disks at a time it is actually a bit. Which operating system would you recommended along with ZFS then? BSD or something else? And thanks for the reply!

[Zachary]

I think currently it's FreeBSD. You will not do deduplication today, but may be requiring it within the next year. But it's not deduplication so its important if you have less than 10 TB of data anyway right now. FreeBSD 8.1 64 bit is stable and has very good documentation. If you have a very new CPU then I would suggest, after a minimal installation of FreeBSD 8.1, to use GCC and binutils with the FreeBSD Ports Collection.

[Amie]

Again, it depends on how you configure your ZFS pool: you can have raidz/2/3, you can have single drives, you can mirror disks (ie RAID1), you can Span disks (ie RAID0), etc. In a pool you can combine all these different types vdev, but it is not necessarily recommended. And then comes, all depends on what kind of requirements that are set for performance, uptime, etc. At present I run OpenSolaris, but considering strongly to switch to FreeBSD. Otherwise it will be possibly Illumos with OpenIndiana - the time for display.