Date: Tue, 11 Mar 97 23:56:39 CST From: Joe Greco <jgreco@solaria.sol.net> To: sysop@mixcom.com (Jeffrey J. Mountin) Cc: isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: freebsd as a news server? Message-ID: <199703120556.XAA03764@solaria.sol.net> In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19970311193715.0115c720@mixcom.com> from "Jeffrey J. Mountin" at Mar 11, 97 07:37:16 pm
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> At 10:01 AM 3/11/97 CST, Joe Greco wrote: > >My basic philosophy has always been to reduce resource contention > >whereever I can. The nice ultra wide SCSI controller that Matthew > >has probably cost $200-$300. I can outfit a system with three NCR-810 > >controllers for that price (actually more like $120 if I use the real > >cheap ones, a bit risky) and I gain three independent SCSI busses. > > > >I usually like to stripe _across_ the controllers, although I can't say > >for sure that putting spool and history on separate SCSI busses is a > >bad idea. The real idea is simply to provide as much independent I/O > >capacity as possible. > > Not sure if 2.2 supports it, but what about the Adaptec 3985 card and use > RAID5? There are 3 channels and IO is spread across all 3. The price is a > bit high, however. Not supported. The 3985 is apparently pretty much a triple channel 2940, sorta like the dual channel 3940, which works great under FreeBSD. The 3985 simply has a third SCSI bus and silicon to do the more intensive parts of the RAID parity calculations, as I understand it. I was told a year ago that triple-bus 3985 support would probably be trivial to implement. I have access to a 3985 but haven't tried it. I generally prefer sticking lots of NCR-810 based controllers in a system. > Yeah I know, just what you need: hot swapping for news. :) > > Just an idea. I think if I were going to do it, I would do mirroring. You don't have the overhead of read-calculate-write cycles to generate parity blocks for small writes (the majority of what a news server does). Writes should be as fast/slow as their single drive counterpart, and you get the benefits of more heads when reading. It is nearly as efficient as striping, except for the writing bit, I think. But it's too early in the morning to be thinking about this... Besides, by the time you mirror all that disk, why not just build another box and gain redundancy for those annoying times when something dies? :-) > Definately agree on using smaller drives, but have more of them. Well, of course! :-) ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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