ZFS or UFS for 4TB hardware RAID6?

[FBSD UG]

>
>> A bit of reading shows that ZFS, if it's stable enough, has some  
>> really great features that would be nice on such a large pile o'  
>> drives.
>>
>> See http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSQuickStartGuide
>>
>> I guess the last question I'll ask (as any more may uncover my  
>> ignorance) is if you need to use hardware RAID at all?  It seems  
>> both UFS2 and ZFS can do software RAID which seems to be quite  
>> reasonable with respect to performance and in many ways seems to be  
>> more robust since it is a bit more portable (no specialized  
>> hardware).
>
> I've thought about this one a lot. In my case, the hard drives are in
> a separate enclosure from the server and the two had to be connected
> via SAS cables. The 9690SA-8E card was the best choice I could find
> for accessing an external SAS enclosure with support for 8 drives.
>
> I could configure it in JBOD mode and then use software to create a
> RAID array. In fact, I will likely do this to compare performance of a
> hardware vs. software RAID5 solution. The ZFS RAID-Z option does not
> appeal to me, because the read performance does not benefit from
> additional drives, and I don't think RAID6 is available in software.
> For those reasons I'm leaning toward a hardware implementation.
>


Hi Maxim,

RAID-Z2 is the RAID6 double parity option in ZFS.


gr
Arno