From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Apr 17 2:14:10 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from arrakis.tamu.edu (arrakis.tamu.edu [165.91.250.118]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 32F5637B405 for ; Wed, 17 Apr 2002 02:14:02 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nipsy by arrakis.tamu.edu with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 16xlVp-0006TB-00 for ; Wed, 17 Apr 2002 04:14:01 -0500 Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2002 04:14:01 -0500 From: Mark Nipper To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: RAID spanning over two 2400A's supported? Message-ID: <20020417091401.GC24693@arrakis.tamu.edu> References: <20020417075728.GA94009@myhakas.estpak.ee> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="2JFBq9zoW8cOFH7v" Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20020417075728.GA94009@myhakas.estpak.ee> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG --2JFBq9zoW8cOFH7v Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Wed, Apr 17, 2002 at 10:57:28AM +0300, Vallo Kallaste wrote: > We're considering Adaptec 2400A's for new server. Will the asr(4) > driver support more than one controller and RAID spanning over two > controllers? Our final goal is 8 disk RAID-5 array, not expecting > great I/O but large storage area. > I guess it's possible to concat or stripe the two RAID-5 arrays with > vinum in case spanning is not supported? Every bit of advice will be > welcome! I just recently assembled a system as our workgroup server using the Adaptec 2400A and four Western Digital "Special Edition" 120GB 7200RPM ATA hard drives with 8MB cache each. I must say it's fantastic! :) I'm not sure whether you can span over two adapters. My inclination is that no, this will not work. But you will probably want to contact Adaptec since this is really an OS independent question. In fact, unless you go to http://linux.adaptec.com/ and post on the "Open Source Message Board" there (you have to create a username and password, but it's relatively painless and I have yet to receive any spam from them), I wouldn't mention FreeBSD at all if you e-mail their normal support channels. Vinum seems like a silly solution to this. It sort of defeats the purpose of having hardware RAID cards at all (and expensive ones at that). Amazingly enough, those 100MHz Intel DAC960's really do take a large chunk out of the processing time required to do all those XOR calculations. It seems like you'd be better off buying a lot of spare non-RAID ATA controllers if you wanted to use vinum. Finally, I will give you my own recent wisdom when dealing with these beasts. I made the mistake of buying a full tower case as well as four Promise SuperSwap (hot swap) drive bays. Now don't get me wrong, I loved the Promise SuperSwap bays. They worked like a charm. The ones I could actually hook up to the Adaptec card with the standard 18" cables that is! :( The ATA standard is very serious about nothing longer than 18" cables. I had the two bottommost SuperSwap bays on 18" cables and never had a problem. But I had the two topmost on 24" "Cables to Go" brand ATA cables, and I kept losing the drives within a 24 hour period of having built the array. Hell, one of them actually failed out the first time while I was still in the process of building the array! Unfortunately, because of the case I chose, I had to send the SuperSwap bays back. If I'd gotten one of the squat, wide massive data storage style cases with 5.25" bays all the way to the bottom, I'm sure things would have worked out okay. Also keep in mind that the Adaptec card is a full length card. You don't want it bumping into things near the front of a standard mid-tower of full-tower case, so plan accordingly. I ended up with my four ATA drives in the six 3.5" internal bays and haven't had a problem since. I've still got 215GB free as of right this second! :) It's really pretty overwhelming having so much drive space for such a reasonable cost. The total system cost was somewhere around $2200 or $2300 after all the returns of stuff (like the SuperSwap bays). If anypone wants the full specifications, let me know. Anyway, if you need me to try anything out for you or run some disk performance tests, I'd be happy to do so. I'm running 4.5-STABLE as of a week or two ago and the machine has been chugging along nicely, even under the heavy NFS load. :) Let me know if you have something for me. I'd be more than happy to help out. I was pretty apprehensive initially not having played with any of this ATA RAID stuff before. But the 4.5-RELEASE CD immediately recognized the card and the installation went without a hitch. I was very impressed. :) The Adapctec FreeBSD utilities worked out of the box as well on the provided CD. As best as I could tell, the utilities on the CD are actually newer than what is available on their site. Anyway, let me know... --=20 Mark Nipper e-contacts: Computing and Information Services nipsy@tamu.edu Texas A&M University http://arrakis.tamu.edu/nipsy/ College Station, TX 77843-3142 AIM: texasnipsy ICQ: 66971617 (979)575-3193 Yahoo: texasnipsy -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- GG/IT d- s++:+ a-- C++$ UBL+++$ P--->+++ L+++$ E--- W++ N+ o K++ w(---) O++ M V(--) PS+++(+) PE(--) Y+ PGP++(+) t 5 X R tv b+++ DI+(++) D+ G e h r++ y+(**) ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ ---begin random quote of the moment--- Do daemons dream of electric sleep()? ----end random quote of the moment---- --2JFBq9zoW8cOFH7v Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iEYEARECAAYFAjy9PNkACgkQ79RuBNw99zCMDwCgnMOenG4C35zuvjUo0bdBd22P TrwAnjAnXfys6SD3fM0G8XkyAWEeKYS/ =SHcx -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --2JFBq9zoW8cOFH7v-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message