I've lost more data in hardware RAID than in ZFS but I have lost data in both.
Hardware RAID has very poor longevity. Vendor support and battery backup replacement collide in BIOS and host management badly.
Disclaimer: I work on Dell rackmounts, which means rather than native SAS I am 'Dells hack on SAS' which is a problem and I know its possible to 'downgrade' back to native.
Yeah we started ordering the ones with the supercap so we didn’t have to replace batteries anymore.
Somewhat recently I dealt with LSI and Dell cards. Longevity seemed just fine for a normal 3 year server lifecycle. The only time we had an issue is when the power went down in the data center. The power spike fried a few of the cards. Luckily we had spares.
Way way back I dealt with the Compaq/hp smartarrays. Those were awful. Also anything consumer grade is awful.
We used the LSI 9286CV-8e (or dell equivalent) which was somewhere between $1000-$1500 back in the day. Worth it compared to babysitting any software RAID IMO.
Pay more for less safety and put all your data into the hands of the guy who wrote the firmware for that thing. I'm sure that software is well maintained open source code.
I've lost more data in hardware RAID than in ZFS but I have lost data in both.
Hardware RAID has very poor longevity. Vendor support and battery backup replacement collide in BIOS and host management badly.
Disclaimer: I work on Dell rackmounts, which means rather than native SAS I am 'Dells hack on SAS' which is a problem and I know its possible to 'downgrade' back to native.
Yeah we started ordering the ones with the supercap so we didn’t have to replace batteries anymore.
Somewhat recently I dealt with LSI and Dell cards. Longevity seemed just fine for a normal 3 year server lifecycle. The only time we had an issue is when the power went down in the data center. The power spike fried a few of the cards. Luckily we had spares.
Way way back I dealt with the Compaq/hp smartarrays. Those were awful. Also anything consumer grade is awful.
The problem with most of these is you have to bring the system down to do maintenance. You can do a scrub on zfs while it's up.
Most non-hobbyist RAID hardware does online-scrub just fine (not that I would recommend wasting money on such hw).
Btw, ZFS scrub is not only a RAID-block-check but also a partial fsck, so its not really comparable.
We used the LSI 9286CV-8e (or dell equivalent) which was somewhere between $1000-$1500 back in the day. Worth it compared to babysitting any software RAID IMO.
Pay more for less safety and put all your data into the hands of the guy who wrote the firmware for that thing. I'm sure that software is well maintained open source code.