From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Feb 10 11:21:05 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA06263 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Wed, 10 Feb 1999 11:21:05 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from out0.mx.skynet.be (out0.mx.skynet.be [195.238.2.35]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA06256 for ; Wed, 10 Feb 1999 11:21:03 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from brad@mail.his.com) Received: from [195.238.1.121] (brad.techos.skynet.be [195.238.1.121]) by out0.mx.skynet.be (8.9.1/jovi-relay-2.0b1) with SMTP id UAA08371 for ; Wed, 10 Feb 1999 20:20:52 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: CTM PowerMail 2.4b2 x-sender: brad@mail.his.com Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 20:19:01 +0100 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: Brad Knowles Subject: Software RAID-5 comparison: FreeBSD 3.0 vs. Solaris 2.6/x86... Message-Id: <19990210201901.026071@relay.skynet.be> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 If you wouldn't take out a one-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to say something, then don't say it by email. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message