What do you use for hardware RAID at home?

IMO the hardware RAID vs. ZFS debate gets more religious than technical. YMMV heavily based on your actual workload.

I'm polling because my old Adaptec card finally died and I'm deciding:
- $20 used LSI 9211-8I from... somewhere... in IT mode
- Or just run ZFS on the HBA and let the CPU handle it

My use case is media + backups, nothing latency-critical. Take it with a grain of salt, but I think "hardware RAID at home" is becoming a misnomer for most hobbyists. What are you actually running?

(I was going to say ZFS (obviously (because snapshots are non-negotiable (even for home use (especially for home use (where you have no SRE team to blame)))))) but then I remembered (this is the hardware RAID thread (not the "I use arch btw" thread (though I do (use arch (btw))))) that I actually started with a Dell PERC H200 (flashed to IT mode (which is basically an HBA (which means it's not really hardware RAID anymore (which proves your point (quinnbizz))))) and still have it in a drawer somewhere (collecting dust (along with my dreams (of being a storage admin (instead of whatever I am now))))

My box has this old LSI card , this is from CloudCone actually xd they sell refurbished hardware and this card was 18$, no problems for 2 years

This is not real hardware RAID though, this is HBA with IT firmware, I use this for ZFS xd so I am cheating maybe

But if you want real hardware RAID, I have friend who buys from RackNerd surplus, they have sometimes old Dell cards for 15-25$, this depends on luck

@quinnbizz what motherboard you have? This matters for compatibility

Actually, (the distinction that matters (for home use (which is what we're discussing)))) is not RAID vs. ZFS but "who manages the redundancy state machine."

Hardware RAID controllers (actually, (the good ones (like old 3ware or Areca (not the fakeraid junk)))) offload parity calculation and rebuild logic. ZFS does this in software with better checksums.

For your media+backups workload (actually, (sequential large files (with low concurrent access)))) the CPU overhead of ZFS is negligible. (I run ZFS on a J4125 (with 16GB ECC (through an LSI 9207-8I (flashed IT mode (from hetzner.com actually (group buy back in 2024)))))) and scrub finishes in 4 hours for 12TB.

The $20 LSI source you're looking for is probably KnownHost surplus. (they don't advertise (email sales directly (mention "home lab" (they have a soft spot)))).

I still run actual hardware raid on my home box its a perc h710 from like 2014 I pulled from a decommissioned work server no cap it just works I dont need snapshots for my plex array I just need it to not die and it hasnt died so thats my review To be fair I tried zfs once and the memory hunger was real my box only has 16gb and it was using like 12gb for arc no thanks I need that for other stuff run on sentence but you get it

In my homelab I use little script to monitor ZFS health, this runs in docker container on same server no? Very convenient

#!/bin/sh
# zfs-health.sh
zpool status | grep -i "error\|degraded\|faulted"
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
  echo "all good in pool"
fi

But to backup topic: if you want real hardware RAID card, I know sztore on KnownHost surplus (they have mailing list for "szerwer parts"). I bought two LSI cards there, 22$ each with shipping. No problems.

@kasiaxus we should make group buy? I need one more for little project in office xd

What CPU though? ZFS can chew through weaker ones at rebuild time

@RAJ J4125 is Celeron quad-core 2.0GHz, about 10W TDP. Rebuild of 4TB mirror took 6 hours last month. Not fast, but box stayed responsive for Plex. (Actually, (I limited zfs_resilver_min_time_ms (to 1000 (so it wouldn't saturate the SATA bus)))).

The CPU question is fair though. If you're on something older than Haswell, I'd probably go hardware RAID too.

@sagepat 6 hours for 4TB on a J4125? That's actually not bad. I've seen i3-6100s struggle more because single-threaded checksum verification becomes the bottleneck. ZFS is weird like that.

@quinnbizz if your motherboard has IPMI, check whether the LSI card shows up in BIOS boot messages properly. Some SuperMicro boards are picky about BAR allocation with HBAs in IT mode.

@kasiaxus B450M Pro4, so nothing exotic. The LSI should just work, but good looking out.

@cpanelliw780 12GB ARC on 16GB total is wild, did you set a max or let it autotune? I thought the default cap was 50% but maybe I'm misremembering.