On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 6:19 PM Ashton Fagg <ashton@fagg.id.au> wrote:
> a) Is softraid reliable enough to support my use-case? Does anyone have
> anecdotes to encourage/discourage use of softraid for this application?
>
I believe softraid is reliable enough, but I don't use it so I can't say so
from
personal experience. I do use Samba and NFS though and can report that
those work acceptably well. Reading a large file via Samba over a gigabit
link runs at between 30MB/s and 110MB/s in OpenBSD 6.8. This is a big
improvement over older OpenBSD releases.
> b) Would I be better off using the LSI RAID controller for the arrays?
>
I do, but mostly because I want to use RAID10 which is not officially
supported
in OpenBSD softraid. It's also nice to be able to take advantage of the
battery
backed delayed write cache on my controller (a Dell PERC H700 in my case).
One thing you might find important is that using hardware RAID makes it
harder
to closely monitor controller and disk status, since the controller vendor
provided
software typically won't work on OpenBSD. If your drive enclosure supports
alert LEDs then keeping an eye on those indicators may be the easiest way
to monitor array health.
c) Bearing in mind that the provisioning scheme I have in mind is to
> provision the disks in pairs (forming RAID1 arrays), thus resulting in
> 3-4 separate volumes (6-8 disks), is there any reason I should *not* use
> OpenBSD, and look more toward something like TrueNAS or FreeBSD?
>
I suspect that the OpenBSD port of Samba will give you more challenges
than OpenBSD itself. I suggest setting up a small test server and verifying
client compatibility (including user authentication) before building the
full server.
-ken
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