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Project: Rackmount Overkill
- Thread starter Automata
- Start date
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2005
- Location
- Tau'ri
What in those statements makes sense to you?.. hmm no updates = no response let me think...
yes, i subbed you schlub
Build it up I am waiting (Happy with 2 2TB drives here...)
OP
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Thread Starter
- #723
I'm not sure what you mean, there were updates. That is why I said it.
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2006
Careful Thid, I am catching up to you.
2x 7+1 RAID5 arrays on dual Perc5i's, ~11tb useable storage between them in a 4020, that will be Server 2k8 probably.
Im building out the WHS box now, Ill have to get a second 4020 for it.
You better hurry, or I may have to hijack the Rackedhouse title back!
2x 7+1 RAID5 arrays on dual Perc5i's, ~11tb useable storage between them in a 4020, that will be Server 2k8 probably.
Im building out the WHS box now, Ill have to get a second 4020 for it.
You better hurry, or I may have to hijack the Rackedhouse title back!
OP
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Thread Starter
- #725
Got it working. Currently running a 7 drive RAID 6 array. I pulled out a drive while it was live and set the alarm off to see what it sounds like. It is incredibly loud. I won't miss hearing this if a drive goes bad. The SAS expander also came today. I just need the 8087 cable and the 8087 breakout cables, which are on order.
I had it installed last night to test out the controller and had a hell of a time trying to get it to function. Luckily, I found a fix, purely by accident. If I let it sit at the drive selection screen (motherboard feature) for 30 seconds and selected a boot drive, it loaded the RAID card BIOS. Annoying to do, but a heck of a lot better than trying to make this work from a command line.
I never took pictures of the Seagate Savvio drives that I've been using, so here are the three:
Here were the pictures I took last night:
I had to attach a fan to the RAID controller. It was getting a tad warmer than I'd like. I'll probably pick up a higher speed fan later, this is all I had on hand.
The HP SAS expander:
And both cards installed. I don't have all the cables to get everything hooked up, so it is a bit cleaner than what it will look like.
I had it installed last night to test out the controller and had a hell of a time trying to get it to function. Luckily, I found a fix, purely by accident. If I let it sit at the drive selection screen (motherboard feature) for 30 seconds and selected a boot drive, it loaded the RAID card BIOS. Annoying to do, but a heck of a lot better than trying to make this work from a command line.
I never took pictures of the Seagate Savvio drives that I've been using, so here are the three:
Here were the pictures I took last night:
I had to attach a fan to the RAID controller. It was getting a tad warmer than I'd like. I'll probably pick up a higher speed fan later, this is all I had on hand.
The HP SAS expander:
And both cards installed. I don't have all the cables to get everything hooked up, so it is a bit cleaner than what it will look like.
Last edited:
OP
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Thread Starter
- #726
Got the Intel RAID Web Console 2 up and running on the server. Nice and easy to install on CentOS 5.6:
Code:
Install the webserver for the RAID card:
yum install compat-libstdc++-33 libpciaccess libsysfs net-snmp net-snmp-libs net-snmp-utils
./install.sh -a
OP
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Thread Starter
- #727
Was sending an iso to the server to try the virtual machine and it copied extremely quick. Did a test with a larger file to find it doing over 100mb/sec (writing) sustained while doing the background initialization of the array. Reads are at 116mb/sec, but I couldn't reproduce the results with the background initialization running.
OP
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Thread Starter
- #728
7 Hitachi 1TB drive in a RAID 6 array under a LSI 8708EM2 RAID controller:
Code:
[root@thideras-server hitachi]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hitachi/test.iso bs=1G count=5
5+0 records in
5+0 records out
5368709120 bytes [COLOR=Red](5.4 GB) copied, 7.5864 seconds, 708 MB/s[/COLOR]
Code:
seeker /dev/sdd1
Seeker v3.0, 2009-06-17, http://www.linuxinsight.com/how_fast_is_your_disk.html
Benchmarking /dev/sdd1 [8873046842 blocks, 4542999983104 bytes, 4230 GB, 4332542 MB, 4542 GiB, 4542999 MiB]
[512 logical sector size, 512 physical sector size]
[1 threads]
Wait 30 seconds..............................
Results: [COLOR=Red]81 seeks/second, 12.230 ms random access time[/COLOR] (3539871191 < offsets < 4540278939155)
Last edited:
- Joined
- May 12, 2010
- Location
- Wilsonville, OR
O.O da-hell you need 16 TB for other than being able to say you have it, thats an obvious man need!
OP
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Thread Starter
- #731
DVD/Bluray, music and computer backups would fill that pretty quick.
- Joined
- May 12, 2010
- Location
- Wilsonville, OR
thats a good point love the setup though I wish I had a man cave as glorious as yours! to fill with racks and other man things....
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2006
I have over 600 DVDs (I count a full season as 1 DVD), I do a FULL disc rip and dont convert, so each disc takes 4-8GB each.
My music collection (which literally is 100% legit), is over 100gb.
You would be surprised how quickly you can fill up space when you digitize things.
The system has been rock solid for a good while now
If I cant scrape enough $$$ to get a hardware RAID card decent soon I might go with software RAID. It's just hard to find a 3 port + (I would like 5port) card that is cheap and uses either PCI-X or PCI-e. Could settle for a 4 port card for cheap but they still use a PCI bus
Don't give it a second thought, I firmly believe that once anyone tries software raid through linux, they'll never use anything else.
OP
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Thread Starter
- #737
Well, except real hardware RAID with a good controller.
thid, adragon, know that I will purchase as many hard drives as I need to to make sure that I have more storage than you do.
my rack is out in the garage, everything is sitting on a folding table right now.
First time I've seen this thread thid, definitely subscribed. Have heard about WHS and those expanders, and while I really dislike WHS, I have been curious to see some real word use of expanders from someone that can find their *** with both hands.
my rack is out in the garage, everything is sitting on a folding table right now.
First time I've seen this thread thid, definitely subscribed. Have heard about WHS and those expanders, and while I really dislike WHS, I have been curious to see some real word use of expanders from someone that can find their *** with both hands.
OP
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
- Thread Starter
- #739
Still have not got the cables for the SAS expander, but I got to play with the RAID array tonight a bit. One issue that I had (on the old card) was running multiple VM's and attempting to stream audio/video from the array. It would always stutter very badly and even pause for long periods while the controller caught up.
So, tonight, I was determined to make my music skip. I took a few attempts at it. The FLAC media that I was listening to was roughly 160-200 KiB/sec, which is more than a regular quality movie file.
Attempt 1 - Failed (no skips):
Install my spare copy of 2k3 and 7 at the same time. 2k3 has a 16gb disk and 7 has a 64gb disk and is fully initialized, meaning it was created at the time of the install.
Attempt 2 - Failed (no skips):
Still installing 7.
Install the first Windows XP.
Install the second Windows XP (wouldn't let me do both XP's at the same time).
Web server sitting idle, but running.
Attempt 3 - Failed (no skips):
Windows updates for 2k3.
Windows updates for 7.
Windows updates for first XP.
Windows updates for second XP.
Web server sitting idle, but running.
Attempt 4 - Succeed (very short skips):
Windows updates for 2k3.
Windows updates for 7.
Windows updates for first XP.
Windows updates for second XP.
Web server sitting idle, but running.
Create a huge file on the RAID array (200gb - dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hitachi/vm/hugefile.omg bs=1G count=200)
I can't kill it and this is substantially better than my previous setup. It took 4 Windows virtual machines updating and "dd" to give any sort of delay. For having that many VM's doing tons of random I/O and dd writing over 300 MiB/sec at the same time, I'm impressed. If/when I get more drives for this, the VM's will be off the main storage array so it doesn't cause this issue. I just wanted to see how much I could load up the hard drives and the controller before I started hitting limits.
Currently, my server is sitting at a load of "13.02 10.21 6.52" and still working like no VMs are running.
So, tonight, I was determined to make my music skip. I took a few attempts at it. The FLAC media that I was listening to was roughly 160-200 KiB/sec, which is more than a regular quality movie file.
Attempt 1 - Failed (no skips):
Install my spare copy of 2k3 and 7 at the same time. 2k3 has a 16gb disk and 7 has a 64gb disk and is fully initialized, meaning it was created at the time of the install.
Attempt 2 - Failed (no skips):
Still installing 7.
Install the first Windows XP.
Install the second Windows XP (wouldn't let me do both XP's at the same time).
Web server sitting idle, but running.
Attempt 3 - Failed (no skips):
Windows updates for 2k3.
Windows updates for 7.
Windows updates for first XP.
Windows updates for second XP.
Web server sitting idle, but running.
Attempt 4 - Succeed (very short skips):
Windows updates for 2k3.
Windows updates for 7.
Windows updates for first XP.
Windows updates for second XP.
Web server sitting idle, but running.
Create a huge file on the RAID array (200gb - dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hitachi/vm/hugefile.omg bs=1G count=200)
I can't kill it and this is substantially better than my previous setup. It took 4 Windows virtual machines updating and "dd" to give any sort of delay. For having that many VM's doing tons of random I/O and dd writing over 300 MiB/sec at the same time, I'm impressed. If/when I get more drives for this, the VM's will be off the main storage array so it doesn't cause this issue. I just wanted to see how much I could load up the hard drives and the controller before I started hitting limits.
Currently, my server is sitting at a load of "13.02 10.21 6.52" and still working like no VMs are running.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2006
thid, adragon, know that I will purchase as many hard drives as I need to to make sure that I have more storage than you do.
my rack is out in the garage, everything is sitting on a folding table right now.
First time I've seen this thread thid, definitely subscribed. Have heard about WHS and those expanders, and while I really dislike WHS, I have been curious to see some real word use of expanders from someone that can find their *** with both hands.
make absolutely sure that you do not get WHS "Vail", They removed the drive expander portion from the new WHS.
Microcenter has a builder copy of WHS for 99.
Thid, I think that cw823 has challenged you and I, it appears that the gauntlet is in fact lying on the ground and the side of my face stings.
CW823, I accept your challenge and await you at dawn! Shall it be sheer drive space or numeric quantity of running drives?
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