On Wed, Dec 2, 2020 at 6:19 PM Ashton Fagg <[email protected]> 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
