Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:56:33 +0200 From: Joze Volf <joze@ilab.si> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Large RAID arrays, partitioning Message-ID: <48A560E1.7080701@ilab.si>
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Hi folks, I have a HP DL320s 2U server with 12 500 GB SATA drives and Smart Array P400 RAID controller. The machine will be a video streaming server for a public library. The system I am installing is 7.0-RELEASE, amd64. I made 2 RAID6 volumes, one 120GB for the system and one 4.3TB for the streaming media content. The first problem I have encountered is that during installation, the large RAID volume wasn't visible. No problem, because I could install the system to the small 120G volume. After the base system installation I decided to delete the large volume using the HP ACU and create a few smaller 1TB volumes, which will hopefully be recognized by the kernel. They were, buth when I ran the fdisk from sysinstall it always reported: WARNING: A geometry of xxxxxxx/255/32 for da1 is incorrect. Using a more likely geometry. If this geometry is incorrect... I was trying to do a few 1TB vinum partitions and tying them together into single concatenated volume (I already did something similar in linux using LVM and it worked great). I had no success. Then I searched the web and found this patch http://yogurt.org/FreeBSD/ciss_large.diff and hoped it will resolve the geometry problem. It did not, but one other thing it should do is allow kernel to get da device for an array > 2TB. It did! I deleted the smaller 1TB volumes and recreated one large 4.3TB RAID volume. The kernel recognized it perfectly as /dev/da1. Great! Then I tried to create a slice using sysintall fdisk and a filesystem using sysinstall label. Nothing but trouble! I searched the web again and found a possible solution to my problem. I used the "newfs -U -O2 /dev/da1" command to create the filesystem directly on the RAID volume. It worked without a problem. Then I mounted /dev/da1 to /var/media and here is the output of "df -h" command: Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0s1a 4.3G 377M 3.6G 9% / devfs 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev /dev/da0s1e 7.7G 12K 7.1G 0% /tmp /dev/da0s1f 36G 1.6G 31G 5% /usr /dev/da0s1d 58G 25M 53G 0% /var /dev/da1 4.3T 4.0K 4.0T 0% /var/media Is it somehow bad to make a filesystem directly on a storage device such as disk drive or hardware raid volume? Regards, Joze Volf iLab d.o.o.
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