Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:57:03 -0400 From: Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com> To: Joze Volf <joze@ilab.si> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Large RAID arrays, partitioning Message-ID: <20080815075703.951bacb9.wmoran@potentialtech.com> In-Reply-To: <48A560E1.7080701@ilab.si> References: <48A560E1.7080701@ilab.si>
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In response to Joze Volf <joze@ilab.si>: > > 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... That always happens. I don't remember the last time I saw a disk where it _didn't_ complain about that. Don't know the details of what's going on there, but I've never seen it cause a problem. > 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. Well, can't help you much if you don't describe what you tried to do here. > 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! What version of FreeBSD is this? It looks like this driver has seen significant redesign in 7-STABLE. > 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! Again, without any details, not much anyone can do to help. > 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? Yes and no. If you use certain type of disk utilities, such as bootable CDs that check disk health and what not, they may get confused by the fact that there is no DOS-style fdisk partition on the disk. Otherwise, it works fine. I frequently do this to make my life simpler (why install partitions when you don't need them?) It also wastes less disk space (although, who cares about a few hundred bytes on a 4T disk). Now that you've got it up and running, I'd be more concerned about making sure your next FreeBSD upgrade will continue to support that sized disk. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com
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