Software RAID on Linux Post: 302282338

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Operating Systems Linux Software RAID on Linux Post 302282338 by mark54g on Friday 30th of January 2009 03:20:20 PM

01-30-2009

Registered User

Software RAID on Linux

Hey,

I have worked with Linux for some time, but have not gotten into the specifics of hard drive tuning or software RAID. This is about to change. I have a Dell PowerEdge T105 at home and I am purchasing the following:

1GBx4 DDR2 ECC PC6400 RAM
Rosewill RSV-5 E-Sata 5 bay disk enclosure with 1x PCI-e Silicon Image E-Sata card

I will soon purchase:
1TBx4 Western Digital Caviar Green drives and modify the firmware to disable standard TLER
It currently already has an 80GB boot drive, which I plan to keep solitary for now, but may mirror in the future when I buy another drive.

I am running OpenSUSE 11.0 and may upgrade to 11.1 if necessary. I plan on running software RAID-5 (md) on the 4 drives and at a later point putting in a 5th drive as a spare for the set.

I have read that there should be a significant amount of tuning to the file system and drives themselves. For the bulk of my storage, I plan on running JFS, even though it has limited support from OpenSUSE as it is still included and has some features I really like, like the inode dynamic allocation and resilience.

I have found info to set the chunk size to about 64-256K and test, as well as setting noatime. What other information can you give me to help make this reliable and fast.

Speed is not as big an issue, as I will be pulling files from a 100Mbit network, but it may be upgraded to gigabit in time.

The applications I plan to run on this machine are:

HypericHQ
OpenVPN
SAMBA
MondoRescue/Mindi
Maybe VMware (testing only)
Maybe DIMDIM
Perhaps a small local Apache or Lighttpd server
Maybe a test ORACLE instance, kept small

mark54g

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

array-info

array-info(1)															     array-info(1)

NAME

       array-info - check the status of a HP (Compaq) SmartArray controller

SYNOPSIS

       array-info -d array_device_path [-a|-l|-A|-c|-s|-L|-h]

DESCRIPTION

       Array-info is a command line tool to retrieve informations and logical drives status from several RAID controllers (currently HP Compaq IDA
       and CISS and MD).  It displays informations about the firmware version, Rom revision, number of physical and logical  drives  on  the  con-
       troller, aswell as the fault tolerance, size, number of physical disks and status for each logical drive.

OPTIONS

       --device | -d
	      Path to array device, e.g. /dev/ida/c0d0 or /dev/cciss/c0d1

       --all-drives | -a
	      Show informations about all drives

       --logical drive | -l
	      Show informations about selected logical drive

       --show-ctrl | -c
	      Show informations about controller

       --show-logical | -L
	      Show informations about logical drives

       --show-physical | -p
	      Show physical device informations

       --show-status | -s
	      Show status of logical drives

       --show-all | -A
	      Show all informations

       --version | -V
	      Show version

       -h     Show help about options

COPYRIGHT

       This  manual page was written by Raphael Pinson <<raphink@ubuntu.com>>.	Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this docu-
       ment under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

								    2006-12-15							     array-info(1)