Dell branded storage controller for ZFS file-server | Advice requested

[Steven Hartland]

On 23/01/2015 15:13, kpneal at pobox.com wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 02:45:56PM +0000, Steven Hartland wrote:
>> I believe h330 is a LSI 3008 underneath with 256 QD which is classed my
>> mrsas as Invader/Fury 12Gb/s MR controller so you should get decent
>> performance from it, as with anything though only testing will answer
>> the question categorically ;-)
> Just curious: Are jbod disks all bootable? Or does only one show up in the
> bios' boot list?
This is BIOS dependent, most provide support for a number of boot disks.
> If only one, what happens if that drive mostly fails but still shows up
> to the bios? How about if it totally fails and doesn't show up? How about
> if the boot process starts but fails after control is passed to the boot
> code loaded from disk?
>
> These questions are part of the reason I boot my Dells from the memory
> card.
>
> Personally, I wish Dell would stop screwing around with the firmware used
> with LSI chips.

Generally we'll use the on-board controller to provide the boot disk 
pool in a simple mirror then configure a large RAIDZ for data, however 
that depends on how the physical disks are attached.

This avoids the issue where the disk being chosen to boot from in the 
BIOS is not actually bootable.