I'm reading the FreeNAS userguide and came across the statement:
Note that hardware RAID configured as JBOD may still detach disks that do not respond in time; and as such may require TLER/CCTL/ERC-enabled disks to prevent drive dropouts.
I'm using a '3Ware 9550SX-8LP RAID Controller' and see quite a few stories of people successfully running raid5 on 7.2k consumer SATA drives without issue.
Are detached disks only a theoretical problem, or should I expect this to be a common occurrence?
Update:
Ok, so drives dropping out is a real problem to be concerned with.
My controller is indeed on the FreeNAS compatibility list and i'm using some cheap Toshiba OEM 500g 7.2k SATA drives. If i'm using HW Raid1 and a drive is disconnected due to seek timeout, will it pop back into raid and sync up the data without human intervention? I'm doubtful that there is a universal answer - feels like this would be controller dependent, but I haven't seen info on this for my 3ware controller, yet.