&gt; Good luck exchanging your fried RAID controller for a &quot;comparable&quot; model<p>If you are running Linux&#x2F;*BSD&#x2F;SmartOS, the best RAID controller is a JBOD controller, i.e. one that that exposes all connected disks as-is to the host OS, and than it would be in-kernel soft-RAID implementing the actual logic.<p>This approach gives you a more predictable system with no vendor-specific idiosyncrasies or extra cache level to worry about (BBU in OP&#x27;s article); you end up running RAID code that is peer-reviewed, fully integrated into fsync() algorithm, and surprisingly, often gives you better performance too.<p>&quot;True hardware RAID controllers&quot;, on the other hand, are nothing more than an application-specific computer with its own (non-upgradeable and often outdated) CPU, RAM, I&#x2F;O and hard-to-upgrade proprietary software.<p>And if you buy into the view described above, than replacing a JBOD controller for RAID use is exactly the same thing as replacing JBOD controller for ZFS use, by definition.