When I was researching parts for my server, the hardest part was choosing a raid card. Trying to determine what raid level to go with and an acceptable price was the most challenging part, and then I found ZFS and realized I didn't need exactly what I had been looking at.

I really appreciate your channel. If i ever forget which card i need for particular purpose i can always rewatch one of your vids. Thank you.

Awesome video! This is the most unbiased explanation I've come across and will watch this often as part of my reference material. Was extremely concerned that my hardware raid implementations were not good enough and were obsolete. Really glad to have found this channel.

Great video! Thanks for taking the time to create it and help out !

Very informative and nicely explained. Good job.

Many thanks from Erbil , awesome illustrations!

Thanks for reminding those old golden days of my initial carrer with LSI.

Great video. Learned a lot. Especially like you people component in choosing between RAID and HBA! Brilliant.

Unbelievably informative thank you.

Very cool comparison. Thanks a lot!

So much information provided. Thanks

I love watching your videos. I learn so much from them.

You explained artfully. Fantastic!

Another great video. Thank you so much. Will be nice a video talking about the difference between raid, 0 1 10 5 6, etc and your experience with them with use cases.

Excellent video. Thanks for your hard work.

While I’m not new to HBA/RAID cards, this video still filled in some holes in my knowledge. Some of the card specific details were helpful too. I didn’t know about the heartbeat light for example.

Awesome video and great channel. Been in this business for many years and always can learn something.

Thanks! Learned a lot, appreciated

Thanks for sharing and make this video, great job!

So good! Thank you so much for this ❤

Outstanding lesson. Subscribed

Great video, keep up the good work.

What a great content. Thanks you dude for share us this useful information. I always I've been working with hardware raids but I want to test hba + zfs

Great ppt man thanks

You hit the nail on the head.

Thanks for your time and effort. (22:19 lol)

Excellent ... Well done ...

Hardware raid used to be necessary to have large data arrays and speed. Major advantage was off loading parity to the controller. It was simple and with a hot spare sort of set it and forget it. ZFS and CEPH are much more CPU intensive but we arent working with sigle core cpus anymore. Nowadays I think GUI driven configuration and management like Proxmox offers are the better solution.

You ROCK!!! Thanks.

Great explanation! I absolutely agree with your closing "most important" point. It's tempting to go for "the best" whether that's the fastest RAID or the fastest car. When things go wrong, what are you ready to handle? I'm off to cuddle with my retired Drobo.

Got those 5 machines home last night. looks like 4 have the perc i/6 and one has the hba. Im stoked. trying to decide to go sata or sas for drives rn. big thanks to you setups moving right along and im learning a lot.

very sound advice to favor RAID for unsophisticated staff. the rebuild in RAID is basically automatic; just pop in a new drive and a day later all is back to normal.

Thank you for this fine video/tutorial! 🇺🇸 👍☕

Great video! It would be helpful to know more about this from a perspective of use cases other than RAID. I only need a SAS card to interface with a tape drive, and a few old SAS drives I have picked up in bulk lots from auctions. I don't use RAID for redundancy because I don't need always-on, my workflow is based on on- and offsite backups. I still don't really know whether one of these cards would be better than the other for my use case (although I do understand more about them in general, thank you).

Is it true that if a raid card fails you need to replace with the exact same model to keep your data? If so, that seems like a pretty significant downside compared with a software solution. Loved the video, great presentation. Clear, concise and easy to follow.

Yes! I would like a HWRAID deep dive video : )

The last point is very very true... Which is also why I have been so slow at migrating my mdadm software RAID to ZFS. But as I have started using a backup for the backup strategy, I have the other half of it on ZFS and have interacted with it, and operated Linux root on ZFS, all to get familiar with it. Still, for Windows environments, ZFS isn't a good option yet, so there hardware RAID still reign supreme.

I had a PERC 6/i RAID controller, and I bought a PERC H700 card because the 6/i doesn't handle drives above 2Tb. However, out of the 9 drives that I had, the H700 could only make a virtual drive for 1 drive. You recommend RAID, but with my experience so far. I am gonna try HBA out because I can't get anything to work with a RAID controller.

Thanks brofor this video, is very detailed and very true. Old techology vs new, In my case I use both, i´m always learn from practice

@ArtofServer Sir, Thank you very much for this video! :)

tip: use raid 0 for all disks and then use zfs that saves parity of the raid 0 on a different disk, a disk parity backup that can be used to restore a disk failure on a raid 0, config can be daunting but is doable

dont forget there are FC HBAs!

Hey, nice vid..... Just a point though about the single most important point to me about RAID systems..... Unless something has changed and I've missed it, if you want to expand your RAID array, you have to stick with the same capacity disk (or waste capacity if you get a larger one). If your storage grows over time, having the ability to use dissimilar HD's allows you to expand as capacity goes up and price comes down. Your older smaller disks naturally get retired as they fail/get replaced. I changed to HBA/Unraid a decade or so ago and I've never regretted it for a second. It maybe an Unraid thing, but I tried multiple RAID cards in JBOD mode and never had any success. When I think of the money I dropped on fancy RAID cards, it makes me weep... HBA cards are so cheap secondhand these days, it's almost a no brainer. Oh, and whatever direction you go in, if you value your data you NEED a backup solution! Personally, I've gone the LTO tape way.........

thanks bro

Hi great video... I'm new in this subject and im glad i came across your channel. I was trying to buy some cards blindly and now this video make me reconsider my setup. i have a question though, how is HBA compared to Sata PCIE expiation cards? everybody say they are rubbish and i have to go for enterprise grade cards but they dont say why?! im planning to use it for windows storage spaces (SSD pool drives)

When you were comparing hardware RAID vs ZFS, you left out a very important part about data integrity. ZFS uses checksums to guard against bit rot. Hardware RAID has a feature called "patrol read" which performs background scanning of disk blocks, but most documentation is very vague about the exact method. Does it use checksums like ZFS, or does it simply read data blocks without checking their integrity and if the drive returns read error, only then it attempts some sort of recovery?

thanks a lot for your videos, I really appreciate them. I still don't see the difference between the IT-Mode on my PERC 730 in the BIOS and a flashed RAID Controller to an IT-Mode. Is there any?

Hello, Great video thanks for making it. I must have missed something thou as I dont know if card will work on windows 11 to add more sata drives as all ports taken on mobo. Also what HBA sas card is best for number of drives (not raid)? Thanks

nice vib Thank you.

informative video

We seek you kind permission to re-produce the content in our local language. Your contents are great and deserves to reach to people who are not that much conversant to English.

Your channel is the shit. Thank you.

If you have only RAID cards and not HBA ones you can always make RAID cards act as HBA ones by setting up JBOD mode or RAID0 on all individual disks and then make a ZFS pool on them. It's not as fun as having HBA card but still.

Does ZFS support SGPIO signaling of the LEDs on the backplane? Does HW RAID? I feel that's important to know. Otherwise, how will you know if a drive member failed?

I have a T7910 w/ a internal SAS3008 RAID card w/ free ESXi. Im not using the RAID features, ie no raid levels configured. In that case, is there any advantages/disadvantages in flashing the RAID card firmware to IT mode ? Rgds.

can seagate exos SATA drives connect to LSI SAS controller ?

I've seen these 10 port sata pcie cards. Would these work as a zfs hba card? I literally have no clue.

A raid card is like an electric screwdriver. An HBA is like a screw bit. ZFS or software RAID is like a drill. If you have ZFS (a drill), you want an HBA (a bit). If you don't, you may want a RAID card (an electric screwdriver)

Could anyone weigh in on the 2TB limit? My end goal is 24 x 20TB 3.5" SATA drives. Right now I have a Dell PowerEdge R730 which only has 8 bays, all of which are full. I'm looking for a new chassis and ofcourse HBA that can support 24 drives with 20TB capacities..

Great info and we'll delivered. But.... Way toooooo many commercials.

Easy to understand video on KZfaq...

Drive Bender for windows and for the win :)

How can we have dual HBA controllers for redundancy ?

What about performance? Comparing raid 6 with ZFS raidz 2 with same amount of disks And is it right to say that if you need to expand the vdev you need to create a new one? With Raid i know you can expand the disks and have more performance by using more disks at the same VD

so JBOD=HBA and we don't need to flash in IT mode raid cards that support JBOD?

Art of Server : the next generation 😂

ZFS Still can't even add a device to vdev, this is still the only major issue with zfs IMO

you save me 1 hr in google , thanks

i understand your point BUT zfs on top of raid OR just plain raid is not nearly as robust or secure as zfs. Here is why.... first, if raid card fails, you lose the raid array structure. It is not as likely but I have seen it happen. 2nd, the drives are tied specifically to that raid card and that machine. Many techs dont realize this but you can remove zfs pooled drives from 1 machine, RANDOMLY place them in a new server, into ANY physical position, and as long as that server can read the drives, you can import the raid and you are back in business. The drives are individually marked as to their zfs membership. 3rd, raid cards are not (easily) ugradeable. You are limited by their processor and ram installed on that raid card. ZFS raid relies on the server CPU and ram and can be tweaked so technically it can be MUCH faster than a raid card. 4th, ZFS raid is much more robust. It is DIFFICULT to destroy a zfs pool, like if u put a zfs pool member ina different machine and try to add it to an existing or new raid, it will warn you AND even tell you the pool name that this drive previously belonged to. Additionally, zfs drives dont have to be the same brand, type, form factor, size.. i.e. you can mix and match sas, sata, 2.5, 3.5, scsi, etc...not always a good idea for performance but in a pinch you can stick in a sata drive to replace a failed SAS drive until you get a SAS replacement. I LITERALLY did this just today. ALSO, zfs pools can be more easily expanded. On the other hand, with hardware raid, it is really easy to "mess up" and lose your raid. PLUS you can't always manipulate the raid from within the OS and it requires a reboot into the raid bios to do anything. WITH zfs, the OS is aware of it and can control it. You NEVER have to STOP your machine to manipulate your zfs pools. This is CRITICAL for our VE platforms where we are running dozens of mission critical vms and containers. So IMO, you are MUCH safer using ZFS pools than hardware raid. Yes there is a learning curve BUT if you can get a low level tech to swap a drive out physically, if they arent savvy enough to rebuild the pool, u can always get a tech to remote in and do it.. like I am doing right now! The only thing I would stay away from with zfs is boot drives. Either do a hardware raid or nvme boot, or a small separate zfs mirror for your boot, but your primary storage which does all the work, should be a separate zfs pool. I have learned this from MANY years of experiences, good and bad.

it's not that simple .... HBA is more demanding solution for cpu power. You can easly get around 50% cpu utilization on HBA matrix. So you need 1 comp. for HBA matrix only. It's good when you make you own NAS. But raid controllers are good when you do some server stuff with some of redundancy. So in my opinion... HBA => NAS, Raid -> Server operating systems.

I will choose RAID. The ZFS recovering process is totally a disaster.

Long story short - RAID card does HW RAID and HBA does SW RAID... All looks fine as long as you dont use VMware, because ESXI doesnt support SW RAID at all...

RAID controller is "single point of failure". If RAID controller is failed your data will be lost. You need to have redundant RAID controllers.

teeeeechnicallly, there is no such this as "hardware RAID" since all RAID is software. RAID cards just have dedicated hardware for running the proprietary software that calculates the RAID. using proprietary software "hardware RAID" can create vendor lock-in, with that specific vendor, or even exact card, being required to even access the data. something like zfs doesnt have this.

smash thumb down button twice, lol