Re: Hardware advice

On 30/5/03 6:17 pm, "scott.marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)ihs(dot)com> wrote:

> On Fri, 30 May 2003, Adam Witney wrote:
>
>> Hi scott,
>>
>> Thanks for the info
>>
>>> You might wanna do something like go to all 146 gig drives, put a mirror
>>> set on the first 20 or so gigs for the OS, and then use the remainder
>>> (5x120gig or so ) to make your RAID5. The more drives in a RAID5 the
>>> better, generally, up to about 8 or 12 as the optimal for most setups.
>>
>> I am not quite sure I understand what you mean here... Do you mean take 20Gb
>> from each of the 5 drives to setup a 20Gb RAID 1 device? Or just from the
>> first 2 drives?
>
> You could do it either way, since the linux kernel supports more than 2
> drives in a mirror. But, this costs on writes, so don't do it for things
> like /var or the pg_xlog directory.
>
> There are a few ways you could arrange 5 146 gig drives.
>
> One might be to make the first 20 gig on each drive part of a mirror set
> where the first two drives are the live mirror, and the next three are hot
> spares. Then you could setup your RAID5 to have 4 live drives and 1 hot
> spare.
>
> Hot spares are nice to have because they provide for the shortest period
> of time during which your machine is running with a degraded RAID array.
>
> note that in linux you can set the kernel parameter
> dev.raid.speed_limit_max and dev.raid.speed_limit_min to control the
> rebuild bandwidth used so that when a disk dies you can set a compromise
> between fast rebuilds, and lowering the demands on the I/O subsystem
> during a rebuild. The max limit default is 100k / second, which is quite
> slow. On a machine with Ultra320 gear, you could set that to 10 ot 20
> megs a second and still not saturate your SCSI buss.
>
> Now that I think of it, you could probably set it up so that you have a
> mirror set for the OS, one for pg_xlog, and then use the rest of the
> drives as RAID5. Then grab space on the fifth drive to make a hot spare
> for both the pg_xlog and the OS drive.
>
> Drive 0
> [OS RAID1 20 Gig D0][big data drive RAID5 106 Gig D0]
> Drive 1
> [OS RAID1 20 Gig D1][big data drive RAID5 106 Gig D1]
> Drive 2
> [pg_xlog RAID1 20 gig D0][big data drive RAID5 106 Gig D2]
> Drive 3
> [pg_xlog RAID1 20 gig D1][big data drive RAID5 106 Gig D3]
> Drive 4
> [OS hot spare 20 gig][g_clog hot spare 20 gig][big data drive RAID5 106
> Gig hot spare]
>
> That would give you ~ 300 gigs storage.
>
> Of course, there will likely be slightly less performance than you might
> get from dedicated RAID arrays for each RAID1/RAID5 set, but my guess is
> that by having 4 (or 5 if you don't want a hot spare) drives in the RAID5
> it'll still be faster than a dedicated 3 drive RAID array.
>

Hi Scott,

Just following up a post from a few months back... I have now purchased the
hardware, do you have a recommended/preferred Linux distro that is easy to
configure for software RAID?

Thanks again

Adam

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