Using ZFS with a hardware RAID card is kind of like this analogy: Say a company that makes vehicles for the military gives you a brand new M1 A2 Abrams main battle panzer tank like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_abrams that normally costs $20 million for free. The M1 Abrams has layers upon layers of thick armor that protects whatever you carry inside it from being corrupted by bullets or anti-tank rockets. But you, as a civilian can't understand why the M1 Abrams has tank treads on it when your Buick station wagon at home has tires instead of tank treads. So you take the steel tank treads off and replace them with rubber tires. You also can't understand why it has layers of thick armor to protect you, so you take that off too. And you can't understand why there is a big gun on the tank, so you take that off as well. Then you go into battle and wonder why your tank gets blown up in the first 5 minutes of combat. Why not just accept that the tank is a tank and take it out into battle without adding unnecessary weaknesses like hardware RAID card that will make your tank vulnerable to bullets and anti-tank rockets? And if you don't know how to add a lot of hard drives to a computer without using a RAID card, here's a hint: just buy an ordinary SATA controller (with no RAID) that is on the Solaris hardware compatibility list and use that instead of the RAID card. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
