Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 13:33:40 -0800 (PST) From: Paul English <penglish@hydro.washington.edu> To: "Brandon D. Valentine" <bandix@looksharp.net> Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Two RAID questions Message-ID: <Pine.HPX.4.21.0201181324590.12302-100000@meter.hydro.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <20020118020026.H74858-100000@turtle.looksharp.net>
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On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Brandon D. Valentine wrote: > On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Paul English wrote: > >1) I'm using some Arena external IDE RAID boxes(www.raidweb.com). These > >are basically standalone embedded computers which have IDE interfaces for > >the hard drives, and a SCSI interface to connect to the host computer. So > >far they've worked well. The big problem is that fscking a 400GB > >filesystem takes a long time when the system crashes. > > Funny, literally about five minutes ago I finished writing quite a long > post about this to the Nashville Linux Users Group (don't let the name > fool you, it's about half made up of BSD users). > > http://nlug.org/mail/nlug__2002_01/0946.html > I've read your post and all of that thread. I have a fair bit of experience with the Arena drives at this point, and my assesment of them is that they are a quality product, but by no means "unshakable." I would say that if your filesystem can't go down, talk to EMC or Network Appliance. That said - my filesystem can go down. What is important to me is reasonable performance, reliability, hot swap, and on the fly rebuild. My understanding is that I could get this from the Arena drives, but the performance is not that great, or rather, the price hasn't come down as technology has evolved - so I think I could get better bang/buck with a 3ware. In addition, I understand that the 3ware also supports hot swap, and perhaps on the fly rebuild? If it does both of those things, *and* gives me a separate channel per drive for 8 drives, then I'm a happy man. The Arena does not give me a separate channel for each drive, and I feel that (and the ATA33) is part of the reason that it doesn't perform too well. > We have several terabytes of data on Arena IIs where I work and I am > currently running them on Linux/XFS. I would prefer to use > FreeBSD/FFS+softdep but am waiting for the snapshot/fsck -B code to get > comitted to -STABLE. I know this post really doesn't help you find a > solution for improving these filesystems under FreeBSD, but I don't know > of any which is why I went with Linux/XFS for the time being. Aah, that is useful information - I will wait until FFS+softdep is in stable before using that, however FreeBSD is a requirement for me, so I will just sit through my long fsck's for the time being. I will have to do more research on that though, since you threw in 'snapshot', in addition to FFS which is something that I would *definitely* love to have! Paul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message
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