Hi Ken, Thanks for your mail.
Kenneth Gober <kgo...@gmail.com> writes: > I believe softraid is reliable enough, but I don't use it so I can't > say so from personal experience. I do use Samba and NFS though and > can report that those work acceptably well. Reading a large file via > Samba over a gigabit link runs at between 30MB/s and 110MB/s in > OpenBSD 6.8. This is a big improvement over older OpenBSD releases. That sort of performance is perfectly adequate for my needs. >> b) Would I be better off using the LSI RAID controller for the arrays? >> > > I do, but mostly because I want to use RAID10 which is not officially > supported in OpenBSD softraid. It's also nice to be able to take > advantage of the battery backed delayed write cache on my controller > (a Dell PERC H700 in my case). > > One thing you might find important is that using hardware RAID makes > it harder to closely monitor controller and disk status, since the > controller vendor provided software typically won't work on OpenBSD. > If your drive enclosure supports alert LEDs then keeping an eye on > those indicators may be the easiest way to monitor array health. That's a good point actually. I hadn't considered the software support. And my hardware is nothing fancy - so no LEDs. I definitely have more SATA devices to attach than ports on the motherboard, so I'll just install the cards in HBA mode. That should allow sensorsd to monitor the status, since its just a passthrough in that case, right? > c) Bearing in mind that the provisioning scheme I have in mind is to >> provision the disks in pairs (forming RAID1 arrays), thus resulting in >> 3-4 separate volumes (6-8 disks), is there any reason I should *not* use >> OpenBSD, and look more toward something like TrueNAS or FreeBSD? >> > > I suspect that the OpenBSD port of Samba will give you more challenges > than OpenBSD itself. I suggest setting up a small test server and verifying > client compatibility (including user authentication) before building the > full server. Yup, good idea. The last of the hardware arrived today so I'll build it out for some testing. I have had performance issues with OpenBSD's Samba server in the past...I didn't investigate since I only needed it temporarily...but I do fully expect that Samba will be the biggest PITA. Oh how I wish we didn't need it...
