Re: zootle Peter Campbell asdf mousepads...
@Matt
"""One of the reasons to use hardware RAID with a proper HBA is the option of a battery-backed cache, which will save you and your data in situations ZFS will simply barf and die"""
It is the other way around, ZFS transactional-atomic nature guarantees that in case of crash or hardware failure the FS will be 100% consistent with no data loss, and that is why it requires RAW access to the disk.
If you have a pysical raid and one disk fails the raid card will mark the drive as failed and deny ZFS access to it. ZFS can not then recover the information in the sane bits of the drive leading to losing the entire array.
ZFS uses lots of RAM, there is never been misinformation about it, it is also clear why, it uses lots and lots of RAM for internal redundancy, and advanced features like de-dup and realtime compression.
Another point in mind is that I would use ZFS on storage nodes, where I would not be running any applications, because storage is the purpose of the system.
None of this means that you can not use a physical RAID controller, I'm not saying ZFS is the solution for every and all situations, just trying to explain where ZFS is practical.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
