On Fri, 12 Apr 2013, James Harper <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au> wrote:
Disagree about the hardware raid comment. You say "most hardware RAID", but if you consider the set of hardware RAID implementations that you would actually use on a server, mdadm is pretty feature poor. In particular the advantages of hardware RAID are:
Also Linux Software RAID doesn't have some of the problems that some hardware RAID has. For example on a HP DL-360 server some years ago I had terrible performance on SATA disks and had to upgrade to SAS. Linux Software RAID gives decent performance on SATA.
Does ZFS have any native support for battery or flash backed write cache?
It has the ZIL and L2ARC which can both be on any type of fast storage, a NVRAM device would do. Recent versions of ZFS won't be totally broken if the ZIL is corrupted so that's a safe thing to do on NVRAM. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/