Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 21:45:52 -0400 From: "Brian T. Schellenberger" <bts@babbleon.org> To: <mike@samsa.com>, <questions@freebsd.org>, "Derek" <derek@durham.net> Subject: Re: Promise ATA RAID FastTrak100 TX2 Pro for Freebsd 4.5 Message-ID: <200208212145.52162.bts@babbleon.org> In-Reply-To: <200208212123.AA67830030@samsa.com> References: <200208212123.AA67830030@samsa.com>
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On Wednesday 21 August 2002 09:23 pm, Mike Stackhouse wrote: | Thanks - we'll try without softupdates. Softupdates should increase both performance and reliability, at the cost of sometimes making you "seem" to have less disk space than you actually have when the updates are behind the requests. (This problem is apparently fixed in -CURRENT, though.) So there's no reason not to try it and see what happens but I'd be surprised if it *helped* performance to turn off softupdates. Another thing that of course that has an huge impact on performance is write caching; disabling it is slower but safer; enabling it is faster but more dangerous. Personally I take advantage of the increased performance that softupdates gets me to disable the write caching. This is much safer than without softupdates and with write caching and only slightly slower. I personally strong recommend *against* enabling both write caching and softupdates at the same time; it should be very fast but in my experience it makes it very, very easy to lose state on power-down. | Interesting comment on no support for hot swap. Support for hot swap in ATA was added during the 4.5-STABLE period and is in 4.6-RELEASE. It is not present in 4.5-RELEASE. Unfortunately, the "new" ATA code that added this support also broke some ATA stuff, especially w/r/t CD-ROMs, so a test configuation might be advisable first to make sure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. | Our whole intention | for raid-1 is to prevent system downtime in case of drive failure. | From your comment, doesn't sound like FreeBSD supports this? Would | our only alternative be software raid? | | Thanks in advance! | ---------- Original Message ---------------------------------- | From: "Derek" <derek@durham.net> | Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 16:22:12 -0400 | | >> Is there something we should do to optimize our configuration? | > | >We have installed the very same product on one of our FreeBSD | >boxen, it was 4.4-STABLE when we ran the install program, and | >every thing went smooth. I believe this was before softupdates | >was enabled by default. Perhaps when you are creating your mount | >points you could try disabling softupdates and see if that makes | >a difference. | > | >As a side note (that you might want to know), I don't believe | >that the driver in FreeBSD supports hot swap. At least any time | >we've had a drive fail, we get a kernel panic, and it's rebuild | >mirror from the card's BIOS. | > | >Regards, | >Derek | | To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org | with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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