I inherited a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge T610 from my work recently. I have it setup with Truenas and plan to have it be our new Jellyfin, file storage, and whatever else I can figure out. But I’m new to Raid setups and was hoping for advice before proceeding. After doing a little research I figured a Raid 5 configuration would be a fun experiment and could help with stability in the long run.
My question is, should I manage drives via the hardware controller? Or Truenas?
The server has a hardware raid controller and the drives have to be configured in the bios in order to be visible by an OS. Easy enough. I setup 4 drives in a Raid 5 configuration, boot to Truenas. I try to make a pool with the vdrive but then Truenas wants to configure it. If I chose anything other than Raid 0 it would cut into the storage even more. So I went back in, changed the 4 drives to Raid 0 in the bios, then setup the pool in Truenas using the 4 individual vdrives. But then I started to wonder if the two would be compatible in the long run?
Then in wondered, is Raid 5 even worth it? I have a single drive I currently use as a direct backup of our important photos, videos, etc. That one is not going in the array but will be copied over for easy access and kept as a backup. So with a direct backup of the important stuff do I really need to sacrifice space for mirroring and parity?
I’m curious what you all think.
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Hardware RAID is dead.
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They’re no faster than Software RAID today
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They’re vendor and often model locked to a particular make or model of card (so if your card goes bust, so does your array, where software options you can migrate the entire machine to a completely new one, as long as the disks are good so is your data)
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ZFS wants access to individual disks anyway
Check which raid card your Dell shipped with, if it’s a PERC H200 or H310, you can flash it to IT mode to make it work as a plain HBA. If it’s a PERC 700, you’re SOL on IT mode. I’m pretty sure it can expose vdrives, but that’s probably more trouble than getting a cheap HBA at that point.
Be mindful to not set the H200 to passtrough mode. You need to flash the IT firmware to it for it to work properly.
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The safest and most flexible option would be to configure the BIOS to not use the RAID controller and just “see” the drives as a regular JBOD, and then setup a ZFS RAID-Z1 array and configure your zvols, etc. in that instead. RAID-Z1 is functionally very similar to old-school RAID-5. There’s virtually no performance penalty with software RAID these days, and you’re eliminating the proprietary RAID controller as a single point of failure.
Also zfs provides checksum