Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 20:19:01 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Software RAID-5 comparison: FreeBSD 3.0 vs. Solaris 2.6/x86... Message-ID: <19990210201901.026071@relay.skynet.be>
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Folks,
I'm in the process of setting up a new anonymous ftp server for the
ISP that I work for, and I'm wondering if you might be able to give me
some advice.
Specifically, I have currently chosen to go with Solaris 2.6/x86 +
Solstice DiskSuite 4.1 (RAID 5) + UFS logging.
Among other things, this gives me a log-structured filesystem so that
I never have to fsck /export/home/ftp, the DiskSuite tools let me grow
the filesystem while it's online (and it doesn't have to be blown away
and re-newfs'ed), and there are some pretty cool performance monitoring
tools available from Rich Petit (SymbEL 3.x) and Adrian Crockcraft
(author of the book _Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet_).
Now, I can't change the hardware (400Mhz Intel Pentium II w/ 256MB
RAM, internal Western Digital 4.3GB UltraSCSI2 HD, Adaptec 3940UW SCSI
controller, five Quantum 9GB and four Western Digital 9GB UltraSCSI2
drives). The two sets of SCSI disk drives are mounted as two separate
filesystems.
However, if there were likely to be a significant performance
increase with FreeBSD 3.0 + vinum + softupdates, I'd seriously consider
switching (although I'd still want to try to find some decent performance
monitoring tools, hopefully as good as SymbEL 3.x).
At the moment, I'm not interested in running these drives in pure
striping mode. The machine isn't *that* important to us and our
customers that we need a hardware RAID controller, but whereas you could
probably get away with just striping a news server, I think the downtime
on a system-wide ftp server would probably not be acceptable.
If anyone can provide alternative arguments to this position, I'd
love to hear them.
One thing I do know (from scouring previous posts to this mailing
list, as well as previous posts to news.software.nntp), is that you want
to set the stripe size as large as you feasibly can, so that any file
access is highly likely to hit only one disk at a time, thus allowing
multiple simultaneous disk accesses to be relatively evenly spread over
all drives that are available.
Is there anything else I should know?
--
Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/>;
<http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE38CCEF1>;
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