ZFS-only booting on FreeBSD

[David Brodbeck]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 1:52 PM, Daniel Staal <DStaal at usa.net> wrote:
> I see the advantage, and that it offers higher levels of resiliency and if
> properly handled should cause no problems.  I just hate relying on humans to
> remember things and follow directions.  That's what computers are for.
> Repairing a failed disk in a ZFS boot pool requires a human to remember to
> look for directions in an unusual place, and then follow them correctly.

That's why I generally prefer to boot off hardware RAID 1 in
situations where reliability is critical.  There are too many fiddly
unknown factors in booting off software RAID.  Even if you do
everything else right, the BIOS may refuse to look beyond the failed
drive and boot off the good one.  I save the software RAID for data
spindles (which I tend to keep separate from the boot/OS spindles,
anyway.)

2-port 3ware cards are relatively inexpensive, and well supported by
every OS I've used except Solaris.  If you're going for RAID 1 you
don't need expensive battery-backed cache.