I haven ' t surveyed enough pros to know the last cue they used prior to being sponsored , but of the ones I have asked , all of them were using a nonsponsored production cue . Considering the level of their ability just prior to getting a sponsor , you ' d think that if custom cues were in any way inherently superior , they ' d all have been using custom cues and they weren ' t . <| sep |> Ok , so . You ' re not gonna want to have a hardware raid controller in nonit mode in front of ZFS . The caches can screw with each other , occassionally . But thats not the big issue . The big issue is ZFS expects direct access to the drives , and by putting it through the abstraction layer of the hardware , it slows shit down dramatically . Worse comes to worse , setup multiple raid 0 s with each disk as it ' s own raid LUN , and then put those LUN ' s in zfs . It ' ll ' work ', but not the way you want it to .