Raid Controller cache and ZFS

andrej said:
Would ZFS work better with a RAID controller in IT/JBOD mode and BBU than regular SATA connections on the motherboard, since a RAID controller has a cache and does not need to flush to the disks? Which should be safe because of the BBU, right?
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I'm running a number of 16-drive ZFS pools (on 2TB drives) on 3Ware 9650SE-16ML controllers with the BBU option. This is mostly because of the excellent support for the 3Ware controllers on FreeBSD (both CLI and web-based management, as well as a vendor-maintained driver). There aren't enough SATA ports on the motherboard (6, 2 used for system disk gmirror set, 1 for DVD-ROM) and most of the readily-available add-in SATA controllers seem to be based on the LSI SASx068 chips, which don't have particularly good management support in FreeBSD.

I create 16 single-drive volumes on the 3Ware board, enable cache, and export them to FreeBSD for OS use. This produces higher performance than simply exporting the raw drives, as well as enabling additional 3Ware management functions.
 
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