From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Soeren Sonnenburg Subject: Re: How to build a big file server Date: 05 Jun 2003 12:07:27 +0200 Message-ID: <1054807646.14700.9.camel@localhost> References: <1054800852.1997.15.camel@wusel.schnulli.de> <1054806353.558.16.camel@chtephan.cs.pocnet.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com In-Reply-To: <1054806353.558.16.camel@chtephan.cs.pocnet.net> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: reiserfs-list@namesys.com On Thu, 2003-06-05 at 11:45, Christophe Saout wrote: > > - I plan to build a system with IDE 250GB drives. 7 of them for raid 5 > > and one hot spare. The OS will be on separate hardware raid 1 on smaller > > disks. Does anybody have experience with IDE controlers for the big > > disks? Is it better to use hardware raid oder software raid > > (performance)? > > I'm successfully running a bunch of servers with Promise > Ultra100/Ultra133 controllers and software raid on it (and LVM but > that's another story). iiiieeeek! I don't know how you get them running stably but here two ultra tx2 only caused trouble and were quickly thrown away. so the message is KEEP AWAY FROM PROMISE CONTROLLERS. > The only problem you'll probably run into is that the PCI slots get full > because you should only have one hard disk per cable to get the best > performance. well 6 pci slots gives you 12 disks with el cheapo controllers (hpt37x based ones etc...) so that is not the problem, BUT pci bus speed. I have a software raid5 running here with only 5 disks and on heavy disk io nothing else works on the PCI bus... (e.g. watching tv via pci-tv card is impossible then). > The only problem with that solution is that when one disk fails you'll > have to turn of the machine and exchange the disk, and after turning it > on fdisk it (I love the raid autodetection) and raidhotadd that disk > manually. or use a spare and do it at night :-) > I don't have enough hard disks here to play with them now, but on a raid > 10 configuration here (striping over two raid1 pairs of 200 GB 7200 rpm > disks that can do about 50MB/sec each) a cp -al takes about one minute > over 80.000 files/directories. the raid5 has about the same speed... reading/writing is 40-50M/s. rebuilding a 5*80G raid takes about an hour. Another solution would be to take these transtec external raids which are ide intern scsi extern. I have one (1.2TB) here and it is althoug a bit slower pretty reliable so far... I've had no bad experience with reiserfs on x86 hardware so far and it gets pretty intensively used... Soeren.