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I would be worried about my data behind held hostage by a black box proprietary RAID controller from a hostile manufacturer (unless you're paying them millions to build & design you a custom product, at which point you may have access to internal specs & a contact within their engineering team to help you).

I'd rather have ZFS or something equivalent in software. Software can be inspected, is (hopefully) battle-tested for years by many different companies with different workloads & requirements, and worst-case scenario, because it's software, you can freeze the situation in time by taking byte-level snapshots of the underlying drives as well as a copy of the software for later examination/reverse-engineering, something you can't do with a hardware black box where you're bound to the physical hardware and often have a single shot at a recovery attempt (as it may change the state of the black box).

Have you heard of the SSD failures about a decade ago where the SSD controller's firmware had a bug that bricked the drive past a certain lifetime? The data is technically still there, and would be recoverable if you could bypass the controller or fix its firmware, but unless you had a very good relationship with the manufacturer of the SSD to gain access to the internal tools and/or source code to allow you to tinker with the controller you were SOL.




It was RAID-1, so there's no data manipulation going on, a simple mirror copy with double the read bandwidth.




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