[Discuss] SW vs HW raid (was raid controller drivers)

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

> From: jabr at gapps.blu.org [mailto:jabr at gapps.blu.org] On Behalf Of John
> Abreau
> 
> I don't see how ZFS is a counterexample. I'm aware of ZFS as a software
> component of the OS, but I've never even heard of ZFS being baked into the
> disk controller below the level of the OS.
> 
> An argument about ZFS as an alternative to both hardware and software
> RAID would be completely orthogonal to an argument about the relative
> merits of hardware vs software RAID. It wouldn't be a counterexample;
> instead, it would be an entirely different discussion.

ZFS does software raid, and because it has intimate knowledge of the filesystem (not just doing raid at the block level) it is able to do performance optimizations that cannot be done with hardware raid (having only knowledge of the block level).  So ZFS software raid outperforms hardware raid.

Did that make it clearer?