Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-06-08 Thread Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
On Sun, 02 May 2010, Mike Bird wrote: On Sun May 2 2010 13:24:30 Alexander Samad wrote: My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, I had to write my own script so it did not do mulitple at the same time, turn off the hung process

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-06-07 Thread Jesús M. Navarro
Hi, Hugo: On Tuesday 04 May 2010 20:25:52 Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote: martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Hugo Vanwoerkom hvw59...@care2.com [2010.05.04.1808 +0200]: I forget your specifics, but you do RAID *and* backup regularly to an external lvm2? RAID is not a backup solution, it's an

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-06 Thread Hugo Vanwoerkom
Eduardo M KALINOWSKI wrote: On Ter, 04 Mai 2010, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote: martin f krafft wrote: RAID is not a backup solution, it's an availability measure. But as data availability goes up by using RAID doesn't the need for backing up that same data go down? Or is this just semantics?

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-04 Thread Hugo Vanwoerkom
Ron Johnson wrote: On 05/03/2010 03:45 AM, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ron Johnsonron.l.john...@cox.net [2010.05.03.1039 +0200]: Is that Q21? http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-mdadm/mdadm.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian/FAQ;hb=HEAD Yes. 2. You were asked upon mdadm installation whether you

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-04 Thread martin f krafft
also sprach Hugo Vanwoerkom hvw59...@care2.com [2010.05.04.1808 +0200]: I forget your specifics, but you do RAID *and* backup regularly to an external lvm2? RAID is not a backup solution, it's an availability measure. -- .''`. martin f. krafft madd...@d.o Related projects: : :' :

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-04 Thread Hugo Vanwoerkom
martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Hugo Vanwoerkom hvw59...@care2.com [2010.05.04.1808 +0200]: I forget your specifics, but you do RAID *and* backup regularly to an external lvm2? RAID is not a backup solution, it's an availability measure. But as data availability goes up by using RAID

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-04 Thread Eduardo M KALINOWSKI
On Ter, 04 Mai 2010, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote: martin f krafft wrote: RAID is not a backup solution, it's an availability measure. But as data availability goes up by using RAID doesn't the need for backing up that same data go down? Or is this just semantics? RAID does not prevent against

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-04 Thread Ron Johnson
On 05/04/2010 11:08 AM, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote: [snip] I forget your specifics, but you do RAID *and* backup regularly to an external lvm2? No, no RAID for me *at home*. But at work I manage databases on all sorts of (to use a quaint old phrase) super-minicomputers, and if they ever needed

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-04 Thread Alex Samad
On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 14:50 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: On 05/04/2010 11:08 AM, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote: [snip] I forget your specifics, but you do RAID *and* backup regularly to an external lvm2? No, no RAID for me *at home*. But at work I manage databases on all sorts of (to use a

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-03 Thread martin f krafft
also sprach Ron Johnson ron.l.john...@cox.net [2010.05.02.2300 +0200]: My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, That sounds... wrong, on a jillion levels. It sounds (and is) wrong in exactly two ways: 1. The operation is not a

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-03 Thread Ron Johnson
On 05/03/2010 01:21 AM, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ron Johnsonron.l.john...@cox.net [2010.05.02.2300 +0200]: My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, That sounds... wrong, on a jillion levels. It sounds (and is) wrong in

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-03 Thread martin f krafft
also sprach Ron Johnson ron.l.john...@cox.net [2010.05.03.1039 +0200]: Is that Q21? http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-mdadm/mdadm.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian/FAQ;hb=HEAD Yes. 2. You were asked upon mdadm installation whether you wanted it, and you chose to accept yes. dpkg-reconfigure mdadm

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-03 Thread Ron Johnson
On 05/03/2010 03:45 AM, martin f krafft wrote: also sprach Ron Johnsonron.l.john...@cox.net [2010.05.03.1039 +0200]: Is that Q21? http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-mdadm/mdadm.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian/FAQ;hb=HEAD Yes. 2. You were asked upon mdadm installation whether you wanted it, and

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-03 Thread Sam Leon
Ron Johnson wrote: On 05/02/2010 03:24 PM, Alexander Samad wrote: [snip] My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, That sounds... wrong, on a jillion levels. I would rather the array fail on a monthly resync than have it fail on

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-03 Thread Ron Johnson
On 05/03/2010 08:04 PM, Sam Leon wrote: Ron Johnson wrote: On 05/02/2010 03:24 PM, Alexander Samad wrote: [snip] My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, That sounds... wrong, on a jillion levels. I would rather the array fail on

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-05-02 Thread Stan Hoeppner
Disclaimer: I'm partial to XFS Tim Clewlow put forth on 5/1/2010 2:44 AM: My reticence to use ext4 / xfs has been due to long cache before write times being claimed as dangerous in the event of kernel lockup / power outage. This is a problem with the Linux buffer cache implementation, not

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-05-02 Thread Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
On Friday 30 April 2010 19:10:52 Mark Allums wrote: or even btrfs for the data directories. While I am beginning experimenting with btrfs, I wouldn't yet use it for data you care about. /boot, not until/if grub2 gets support for it. Even then, boot is generally small and not often used, so

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-05-02 Thread Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
On Sunday 02 May 2010 06:00:38 Stan Hoeppner wrote: Good hardware RAID cards are really nice and give you some features you can't really get with md raid such as true just yank the drive tray out hot swap capability. I've not tried it, but I've read that md raid doesn't like it when you just

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-05-02 Thread Alexander Samad
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 6:02 AM, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. b...@iguanasuicide.net wrote: On Sunday 02 May 2010 06:00:38 Stan Hoeppner wrote: [snip] Speeds on my md-RAID devices were comparable to speeds with my Areca HW RAID controller (16-port, PCI-X/SATA, battery powered 128MB cache).  Number of

md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-02 Thread Ron Johnson
On 05/02/2010 03:24 PM, Alexander Samad wrote: [snip] My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, That sounds... wrong, on a jillion levels. -- Dissent is patriotic, remember? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to

Re: md does a monthly resync?? (was Re: Questions about RAID 6)

2010-05-02 Thread Alex Samad
On Sun, 2010-05-02 at 16:00 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: On 05/02/2010 03:24 PM, Alexander Samad wrote: [snip] My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, That sounds... wrong, on a jillion levels. depends a...@max:~$ dpkg -S

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-05-02 Thread Mike Bird
On Sun May 2 2010 13:24:30 Alexander Samad wrote: My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, I had to write my own script so it did not do mulitple at the same time, turn off the hung process timer and set cpufreq to performance. A long

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-05-02 Thread Alex Samad
On Sun, 2010-05-02 at 19:19 -0700, Mike Bird wrote: On Sun May 2 2010 13:24:30 Alexander Samad wrote: My system used to become close to unusable on the 1st sunday of the month when mdadm did it resync, I had to write my own script so it did not do mulitple at the same time, turn off the

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-05-01 Thread Tim Clewlow
On 4/30/2010 6:39 PM, Ron Johnson wrote: On 04/26/2010 09:29 AM, Tim Clewlow wrote: Hi there, I'm getting ready to build a RAID 6 with 4 x 2TB drives to start, Since two of the drives (yes, I know the parity is striped across all the drives, but two drives is still the effect) are used

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-30 Thread Ron Johnson
On 04/26/2010 09:29 AM, Tim Clewlow wrote: Hi there, I'm getting ready to build a RAID 6 with 4 x 2TB drives to start, Since two of the drives (yes, I know the parity is striped across all the drives, but two drives is still the effect) are used by striping, RAID 6 with 4 drives doesn't

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-30 Thread Mark Allums
On 4/30/2010 6:39 PM, Ron Johnson wrote: On 04/26/2010 09:29 AM, Tim Clewlow wrote: Hi there, I'm getting ready to build a RAID 6 with 4 x 2TB drives to start, Since two of the drives (yes, I know the parity is striped across all the drives, but two drives is still the effect) are used by

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-30 Thread Ron Johnson
On 04/30/2010 07:10 PM, Mark Allums wrote: [snip] Someone pointed out what I have come to regard as the best solution, and that is to make /boot and / (root) and the usual suspects ext3 for safety, and use ext4 or XFS or even btrfs for the data directories. That's what I do. / /home are

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-29 Thread Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
On Wednesday 28 April 2010 20:51:18 Stan Hoeppner wrote: Mike Bird put forth on 4/28/2010 5:48 PM: On Wed April 28 2010 15:10:32 Stan Hoeppner wrote: Given the way most database engines do locking, you'll get zero additional seek benefit on reads, and you'll take a 4x hit on writes. I

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-29 Thread Dan Ritter
On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 04:44:32PM -0500, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: On Monday 26 April 2010 09:29:28 Tim Clewlow wrote: I'm getting ready to build a RAID 6 with 4 x 2TB drives to start, but the intention is to add more drives as storage requirements increase. Since you seem fine with

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Stan Hoeppner
Mike Bird put forth on 4/26/2010 3:04 PM: On Mon April 26 2010 12:29:43 Stan Hoeppner wrote: Mark Allums put forth on 4/26/2010 12:51 PM: Put four drives in a RAID 1, you can suffer a loss of three drives. And you'll suffer pretty abysmal write performance as well. Write performance of

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Stan Hoeppner
Mark Allums put forth on 4/27/2010 10:31 PM: For DIY, always pair those drives. Consider RAID 10, RAID 50, RAID 60, etc. Alas, that doubles the number of drives, and intensely decreases the MTBF, which is the whole outcome you want to avoid. This is my preferred mdadm 4 drive setup for a

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Mark Allums
Stan, We are on the same wavelength, I do the same thing myself. (Except that I go ahead and mirror swap.) I love RAID 10. MAA On 4/28/2010 5:18 AM, Stan Hoeppner wrote: Mark Allums put forth on 4/27/2010 10:31 PM: For DIY, always pair those drives. Consider RAID 10, RAID 50, RAID 60,

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Mike Bird
On Wed April 28 2010 01:44:37 Stan Hoeppner wrote: On a sufficiently fast system that is not loaded, the user will likely see no performance degradation, especially given Linux' buffered I/O architecture. However, on a loaded system, such as a transactional database server or busy ftp upload

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Bob McGowan
On 04/26/2010 04:33 PM, Mike Bird wrote: On Mon April 26 2010 14:44:32 Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: the chance of a double failure in a 5 (or less) drive array is minuscule. A flaky controller knocking one drive out of an array and then breaking another before you're rebuilt can really ruin

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Stan Hoeppner
Mike Bird put forth on 4/28/2010 1:48 PM: On Wed April 28 2010 01:44:37 Stan Hoeppner wrote: On a sufficiently fast system that is not loaded, the user will likely see no performance degradation, especially given Linux' buffered I/O architecture. However, on a loaded system, such as a

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Mike Bird
On Wed April 28 2010 15:10:32 Stan Hoeppner wrote: Mike Bird put forth on 4/28/2010 1:48 PM: I've designed commercial database managers and OLTP systems. Are you saying you've put production OLTP databases on N-way software RAID 1 sets? No. I've used N-way RAID-1 for general servers -

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Stan Hoeppner
Mike Bird put forth on 4/28/2010 5:48 PM: On Wed April 28 2010 15:10:32 Stan Hoeppner wrote: Mike Bird put forth on 4/28/2010 1:48 PM: I've designed commercial database managers and OLTP systems. Are you saying you've put production OLTP databases on N-way software RAID 1 sets? No. I've

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-28 Thread Mike Bird
On Wed April 28 2010 18:51:18 Stan Hoeppner wrote: You seem to posses knowledge of these things that is 180 degrees opposite of fact. OLTP, or online transaction processing, is typified by retail or web point of sale transactions or call logging by telcos. OLTP databases are typically much

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-27 Thread Alexander Samad
Hi I recently (last week), migrated from 10 x 1Tb to adaptec 51645 and 5 x 2T drives. my experience, I can't get frub2 and the adaptec to work, so I am booting from a SSD I had. I carved up the 5x2T into 32G (mirror 1e - mirror stripe + parity) - too boot from and mirrored against my ssd. the

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-27 Thread Mark Allums
On 4/26/2010 1:37 PM, Mike Bird wrote: On Mon April 26 2010 10:51:38 Mark Allums wrote: RAID 6 (and 5) perform well when less than approximately 1/3 full. After that, even reads suffer. Mark, I've been using various kinds of RAID for many many years and was not aware of that. Do you have a

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-27 Thread Mark Allums
On 4/26/2010 2:29 PM, Stan Hoeppner wrote: Mark Allums put forth on 4/26/2010 12:51 PM: Put four drives in a RAID 1, you can suffer a loss of three drives. And you'll suffer pretty abysmal write performance as well. Also keep in mind that some software RAID implementations allow more than

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-27 Thread Mark Allums
On 4/26/2010 11:11 PM, Tim Clewlow wrote: I don't know what your requirements / levels of paranoia are, but RAID 5 is probably better than RAID 6 until you are up to 6 or 7 drives; the chance of a double failure in a 5 (or less) drive array is minuscule. . I currently have 3 TB of data with

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-27 Thread Mark Allums
On 4/27/2010 9:56 PM, Mark Allums wrote: On 4/26/2010 1:37 PM, Mike Bird wrote: On Mon April 26 2010 10:51:38 Mark Allums wrote: RAID 6 (and 5) perform well when less than approximately 1/3 full. After that, even reads suffer. Mark, I've been using various kinds of RAID for many many years

Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Tim Clewlow
Hi there, I'm getting ready to build a RAID 6 with 4 x 2TB drives to start, but the intention is to add more drives as storage requirements increase. My research/googling suggests ext3 supports 16TB volumes if block size is 4096 bytes, but some sites suggest the 32 bit arch means it is

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Tim Clewlow
Ok, I found the answer to my second question - it fails the entire disk. So the first question remains. Does ext3 (and relevent utilities, particularly resize2fs and e2fsck) on 32 bit i386 arch support 16TB volumes? Regards, Tim. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Mark Allums
On 4/26/2010 9:29 AM, Tim Clewlow wrote: Hi there, I'm getting ready to build a RAID 6 with 4 x 2TB drives to start, but the intention is to add more drives as storage requirements increase. My research/googling suggests ext3 supports 16TB volumes if block size is 4096 bytes, but some sites

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Mark Allums
On 4/26/2010 10:28 AM, Tim Clewlow wrote: Ok, I found the answer to my second question - it fails the entire disk. So the first question remains. I just figured that out---and I see you have too. The difference between what we would like it to do, and what it actually does can be

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Tim Clewlow
I'm afraid that opinions of RAID vary widely on this list (no surprise) but you may be interested to note that we agree (a consensus) that software-RAID 6 is an unfortunate choice. . Is this for performance reasons or potential data loss. I can live with slow writes, reads should not be all

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Mark Allums
On 4/26/2010 11:57 AM, Tim Clewlow wrote: I'm afraid that opinions of RAID vary widely on this list (no surprise) but you may be interested to note that we agree (a consensus) that software-RAID 6 is an unfortunate choice. . Is this for performance reasons or potential data loss. I can live

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Mike Bird
On Mon April 26 2010 10:51:38 Mark Allums wrote: RAID 6 (and 5) perform well when less than approximately 1/3 full. After that, even reads suffer. Mark, I've been using various kinds of RAID for many many years and was not aware of that. Do you have a link to an explanation? Thanks, --Mike

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Stan Hoeppner
Mark Allums put forth on 4/26/2010 12:51 PM: Put four drives in a RAID 1, you can suffer a loss of three drives. And you'll suffer pretty abysmal write performance as well. Also keep in mind that some software RAID implementations allow more than two drives in RAID 1, most often called a

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Mike Bird
On Mon April 26 2010 12:29:43 Stan Hoeppner wrote: Mark Allums put forth on 4/26/2010 12:51 PM: Put four drives in a RAID 1, you can suffer a loss of three drives. And you'll suffer pretty abysmal write performance as well. Write performance of RAID-1 is approximately as good as a simple

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
On Monday 26 April 2010 09:29:28 Tim Clewlow wrote: I'm getting ready to build a RAID 6 with 4 x 2TB drives to start, but the intention is to add more drives as storage requirements increase. Since you seem fine with RAID 6, I'll assume you are also fine with RAID 5. I don't know what your

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Mike Bird
On Mon April 26 2010 14:44:32 Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: the chance of a double failure in a 5 (or less) drive array is minuscule. A flaky controller knocking one drive out of an array and then breaking another before you're rebuilt can really ruin your day. Rebuild is generally the period

Re: Questions about RAID 6

2010-04-26 Thread Tim Clewlow
I don't know what your requirements / levels of paranoia are, but RAID 5 is probably better than RAID 6 until you are up to 6 or 7 drives; the chance of a double failure in a 5 (or less) drive array is minuscule. . I currently have 3 TB of data with another 1TB on its way fairly soon, so 4