Greets, amanda-users, as I recently got myself an Ultrium 2 drive (at last ...) I wonder how to optimize performance ...
Right now I only have the amanda holdingdisk on one physical SATA-drive which seems to work out OK as long as there is no other I/O on that disk ... The LTO is attached to a good old Adaptec 29160 controller (the only scsi-device), the server is built around some Intel Prescott CPU (yeah, kinda old ...) and runs gentoo linux (32 bit). Right now there are 2 SATA-drives in there, both Seagate, one ST3500320AS, one ST31000533CS. The holdingdisk is an LVM2-LV formatted with xfs, the underlying physical volume is a partition of the ST31000533CS. I see speeds up to 22MB/s with amanda, but also consider the sound of the tape-drive accelerating and decelerating could or should be avoided ... afaik it doesn't shoeshine but it doesn't always stream at constant speed when other apps access the drives. --> What I would like to brainstorm: I think about setting up a software-based RAID0 for the holdingdisk. I have another ST31000533CS to substitute the smaller ST3500320AS, this would give me the opportunity to do some shuffling and get a holdingdisk-raid0 with 100GB or 200GB of size. I assume the filesystem used for the holdingdisk won't matter as much as the speed gained by doing the RAID0, so I would maybe just stay with XFS for simplicity (good with big files ... no headaches ...) Yes, I know, RAID0 means no redundancy but I would take the risk here ... Additional q: Does anyone of you use some specific stinit.def for Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 03 Lun: 00 Vendor: HP Model: Ultrium 2-SCSI Rev: S63D Type: Sequential-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 03 ? Thanks for any feedback, greetings, Stefan
