OK, here's the use case. We're using a Qnap (which is about 50TB*) for production storage and the FreeNAS is the backup server (a bit less). It takes a backup each night and in the event of the production server going down, we switch to the backup and keep working. The backup server is built out of consumer parts in a big case and the old drives from the Qnap, which gets upgraded with new drives each couple of years. The Adaptec card provides 16 SATA ports so I can plug in the drives. We're a small company with little budget for backup (yes, I know. I have to bring it in under the radar) so FreeNAS is a nice solution, because it's free and has enterprise performance. As it's a backup I'm not super-concerned about data integrity and reliability as it's only in production in a worst-case scenario. Two things would need to go wrong at once, which is better than our previous backup plan, which was RAID (yes I know, RAID isn't backup) not best-practice but better than the alternative. Indeed, the plan is to put it off-site in the company apartment a couple of blocks away. So I need to put the Adaptec software on this backup server (I'll look at it with the Windows client) to talk to the card so I can check if the RAID array is healthy without going to the machine, booting into the card and looking at it. The card does have a buzzer for this but that's not going to be much fun for people staying in the apartment. I did do the reading and I know that ZFS isn't great on hardware RAID but I need to address the 12 6TB drives and 4 3TB drives in the box. So I need to be able to check the health of the remote box without getting on a motorbike and interrupting someone's breakfast to check it.
Cheers,
Dan
* We're a localization company in Bangkok who sometimes deal with broadcast media so our storage is outsized for the business we do.
