RAID5: ICH9R, Software RAID or ZFS?

[fBSDmon]

I've set my mind on building myself a NAS for home use, but cannot seem to decide on what hardware or what technology to use. So naturally, I am looking from some input from the community.

1. I've set my mind on buying the Asus P5E-VM DO (6xSATA+2xPATA) which has ICH9R and which according to the hardware notes is not supported. The thing is, I've seen some posts on the net where people claim that a ICH9 motherboard is working for them. Can someone set me straight? Is ICH9R or ICH10R supported by FreeBSD?

2. My plan is to put 4x1TB HDDs in RAID5, but after some 2 days of reading I still cannot decide what is better: ICH9 RAID5 (if supported), Software RAID5 or ZFS!?
ZFS makes perfect sense to me (especially since I'm not using a hardware raid controller), but the ZFS known problems page (http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSKnownProblems) states that ZFS is still not production of FreeBSD!?

So, what shall I use: ICH9R, Software RAID or ZFS?

[Voltar]

You might check out the thread I made on this.

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1119

I'm still in the process of testing everything out, haven't got anything concrete yet.

Edit: The ICH9R RAID may not be supported, not 100% sure though.

[SaveTheRbtz]

I was always against on-board motherboard's RAID.
Just imagine what will happen with your data if after some years your motherboard goes to the hardware heaven and you need to quickly replace it with another one?

[kbw]

That's absolutely right.

Also, an external RAID card may last long beyond its manufactured lifetime. And if that fails when you can't get a replacement, it'll be tricky too.

[SirDice]

I fully agree with ^ and ^^ :e

I still have a few disks still lying around, used to be in a hardware raid set.
Damn mainboard died on me and now I can't find the right controller for the disks anymore :(

So the new mainboard and 4*500GB is currently running software raid5.
That way if the board dies on me again I can just put the disks in another fbsd system and be up and running again.

[sim]

That's absolutely right.

Also, an external RAID card may last long beyond its manufactured lifetime. And if that fails when you can't get a replacement, it'll be tricky too.

Hence any storage solution worth talking about will include provision for data backup.... ;)

sim

[fBSDmon]

Thanks for the info.
I've read some reviews/benchmarks that state that the ICH7 and above has much better performance then software raid and near hardware raid performance in raid0 and raid1. Anyway, being able to access my HDD's after a hardware failure makes more sense :)

Some more questions:

What about ZFS?
If i tune it under amd64 and dedicate 2G RAM, will it be safe to use?

What kind of CPU usage can I expect from SoftRAID/ZFS on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo?

Will FreeBSD work with with ICH9?