On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 06:49:34PM +1000, Russell Coker wrote: > I have just received a free HP DL-385 system, it's quite a nice server > with 16G of RAM, 3*SATA and 5*SAS disks. > > I want to set it up to run Linux software RAID-1 with Ext4 on a pair > of SATA disks for booting and ZFS RAID-Z2 on the 5*SAS disks for data > storage.
if you can, use the third SATA port for the RAID-Z array as well - RAID-Z gets better performance when the number of data disks in an array is a power of 2 (e.g. 4 data disks + 1 parity for RAID-Z1, or 4 data disks + 2 parity for RAID-Z2). the performance difference isn't crippling or even huge, but it is noticable. OTOH, if performance were the most important criteria, then a pool made up of mirrored pairs of drives would be beter (similar to RAID-10) hmmm...depending on your I/O workload, you might be better off putting an SSD in the third SATA port, partitioned to give you a smallish ZIL (4 or 8GB would be heaps) to smooth out sync. writes, and the remainder as L2ARC cache. > The problem I have is that the boot disks were wiped, the DVD drive is > broken and ILO isn't licensed for remote disk access. This combined > with the fact that USB booting apparently doesn't work (it doesn't > boot with my usual USB boot device) means that I have to make the SATA > disks bootable before connecting them. can you get the server to pxe boot? if so, you could set up a debian installer on a local tftp server. all you need is dhcpd and a tftpd (strongly recommend ipxe as a 2nd stage so you can load the debian installer image with http rather tftp) if you need pointers on how to do this, i can send you relevant snippets of my dhcpd.conf and tftp setup. > Does anyone know what the CCISS disk format is for a single disk > RAID-0 (IE a JBOD)? Presumably there is some offset where I can just > put an image of a regular bootable SATA disk and have it work. have you tried just putting a regular bootable disk in? it's been a while since i last used a hp smart array so i can't remember if you have to go into the smart-array bios setup and configure it for JBOD (or, as you say, single-disk-raid-0 because HP's smart-array isn't as smart as the name implies). craig -- craig sanders <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list [email protected] http://lists.luv.asn.au/listinfo/luv-main
