From: Wynne, Conor (Conor.Wynne at domain compaq.com)
Date: Thu 09 Aug 2001 - 12:03:31 IST
Well boys + girls [Dundalk accent]
While the wife was buzying herself with her Donegal mates last night, I had
the opportunity to test out this software raid buzz in linux.
My chosen distribution was Mandrake 7.2 - for absolutely no other reason
other than it was the first in the pile.
Hardware Setup :
one "I spit on you" Gateway2000 p120 with a massive 40MB ram and 1GB
internal IDE HDD - One mother of a machine :)
Adaptec 2940 fast wide controller (its the only one I have after a cpu fire)
:(
External Digital Storage Unit, with 6 Hot-plug SCSI 3 HDD's
Raid Configuration :
I created a RAID 5 with 5 drives, four x 2.1GB drives and one x 4,3GB. I
left the single 9,1 gig drive as a JBOD - unconfigured.
The RAID creation was SO easy that my kids could do it, however it took an
age to create the stripe set - About 1 hour I think. and then another age
installing software to it.
All the drive wen't automagically to the correct size for a raid set. i.e.:
to the smallest pyhsical drive size (for those who don't know), but in the
end I decided to physically set each drive to 2.0GB each.
Installed no problems, but unfortunately after reboot, /dev/md0 (The raid 5
Volume) had lots of bad inode tables, and was fscking all over the gaf.
My question is :
Is this because of very slow processor and low memory conditions of the box
itself? Or is it more likely that I have a failed drive in the array? The
leds are all green on the drives but it is very possible one of them is
dodgy. I will need to low-level format the drive itself and try again to be
sure.
When eventually I do implement the storage unit in my HAN, it will be
running on a DUAL celery 400 so it should handle it no probs. I feel that
the FASTSCSI controller is also part of the problem due to its limited
transfer rate. If anyone has a faster - cheap - scsi controller that they
are willing to part with, please let me know.
Anyone know good RAID tools for linux? Is online spare supported in software
raid? I doubt it actually. To be honest, I was quite surprised that more
than Raid1 was supported. I have built up a decent mp3 + stargate (asf)
collection and would prefer not to loose them.
Regards and sorry for the long mail,
CW
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