Dell T40 vs Raid card

[Tikanderoga]

Hi all

I got a Dell T40 less than a year ago as I had to migrate from a HP Microserver. (old one got flooded, long story).
I've had a raid card LSI megaraid 9261 in it, which was fairly easily replaced from ebay.
But I am running Esxi 6, which I'd like to upgrade to 7 at some stage, but it isn't compatible with the 9261.

Since I haven't really used any of the raid features of the raid card, I'm thinking about ditching the raid card bit, as it also messes with the boot up of ESXi (needs to be legacy mode to enter the setup) and just connect the drives to the Dell T40 controller instead.
Would I be sacrificing performance by doing so?
I'm running Veeam for backups and replication, and the server is hosting media files plus the family documents.

The boot drive is an NVME drive, outside of the raid card, the main drive is a SATA SSD and all other drives are standard NAS drives.

 

[olhachycher]

Ditching the RAID card and connecting the drives directly to the Dell T40 controller should not result in a significant loss of performance for your use case. The main drive is an SSD, which will provide fast read and write speeds regardless of whether it is connected to a RAID card or not. The other drives are NAS drives, which are designed for use in a network-attached storage setup and should also perform well without a RAID card. However, you should keep in mind that without a RAID card, you will not have the benefit of RAID features such as data redundancy. If data loss is a concern for you, you may want to consider a different solution.

 

[Tikanderoga]

Ditching the RAID card and connecting the drives directly to the Dell T40 controller should not result in a significant loss of performance for your use case. The main drive is an SSD, which will provide fast read and write speeds regardless of whether it is connected to a RAID card or not. The other drives are NAS drives, which are designed for use in a network-attached storage setup and should also perform well without a RAID card. However, you should keep in mind that without a RAID card, you will not have the benefit of RAID features such as data redundancy. If data loss is a concern for you, you may want to consider a different solution.

I haven't used the features of the raid card in a while now, so I'm looking at phasing it out, so I'm no longer locked in to an LSI raid container data structure.
I used to run the system in Raid 5, but I realised that it was overkill for what i was doing, so eventually I gave up on it.