RAID: UFS+Geom or ZFS/RAID-Z?

N

nico

I'm planning to install FreeBSD, for the first time, on a system that is currently running Linux.

Right now I have five drives with:
  • RAID 1 for /boot
  • swap
  • mdraid 10 + LVM for everything else
My options seem to be having a software RAID 1+0 on four drives and use the fifth one somewhere else, or putting ZFS on all five drives. I'd like to know how they compare regarding performance, stability, volume management, whether ZFS has any kind of future, and whether both options sound like terrible ideas.

I've also read not to use a separate /boot partition, so is there a list of things people coming from Linux should take into account with respect to FreeBSD?
 
In case of ZFS you may boot directly from the 5-disk volume. In case of RAID10 (graid) you will need BIOS RAID support to boot from it, or if you have no RAID BIOS you may use mirror for root same as before.

Performance depends on your system resources. ZFS needs more RAM for comfortable work than UFS+GEOM, but it has its own benefits.
 
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