Author name: Dan Langille

I've been playing with computers since I read an Elementary Electronics magazine way back in the 1970s. I started contributing to open source projects in 1998. After that, I gradually moved from being a software developer to being a systems administrator.

Benchmarking the Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series DXM03B0Q

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Today, I’ll be benchmarking a Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series DXM03B0Q. I’ve had this for a couple of weeks, but I’ve not been ready for it until today. This drive will not be detected by FreeBSD 9.1-STABLE and before. A relatively recent commit fixed a problem with When I booted with the SSD installed, I saw this in demsg: (aprobe3:ahcich5:0:0:0): SETFEATURES ENABLE SATA FEATURE. ACB: ef 10 00 00 00 40 00 00 […]

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Benchmarking the TOSHIBA DT01ACA300

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Tonight I received a TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 3TB HDD. This is a 7200 RPM SATA III drive. Tests were run with FreeBSD 9.1 in the hardware listed below. The hardware We are testing on the following hardware: motherboard – SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-O ATX Server Motherboard (Supermicro link): $224.99 CPU – AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz 8 x 512KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 8-Core Server : $284.99 RAM – Kingston 8GB 240-Pin

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Benchmarking the Seagate ST2000DM001

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I have a Seagate ST2000DM001 sitting in a server. I’ve run some simple tests. Results are below. Tests were run with FreeBSD 9.1 in the hardware listed below. The hardware We are testing on the following hardware: motherboard – SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-O ATX Server Motherboard (Supermicro link): $224.99 CPU – AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz 8 x 512KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 8-Core Server : $284.99 RAM – Kingston 8GB

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Abandoning all reason and logic in pursuit of the perfect HDD

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Yesterday, I was pretty sure I knew what HDD I was going to buy. I was ready to buy 6 new Toshiba 3TB HDD for a ZFS raidz2 array. Then, last night, I decided to do something entirely out of character for people making HDD purchase. I decided to stop reading and start buying. I decided to buy a single drive of two different types and compare them to each other, and to

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Price / GB for 6 new HDD

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I have been pondering buying some new HDD lately. Price/GB isn’t the only metric. But I did up a list of the short candidates, but before you buy, read below. I should mention all the links below go to Newegg, only because that’s where I was searching. They may not be the best price, but they have a reputation of making sure that links don’t die 6 months after I pasted them. Yeah,

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MIRROR/gm0 has changed from COMPLETE to DEGRADED

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GEOM Watch sent me an email this morning: The status of GEOM MIRROR/gm0 has changed from COMPLETE to DEGRADED. The following components have been lost: ad6 Remaining components: ad3 Here’s the smartctl output: [dan@ngaio:~] $ sudo smartctl -a -i /dev/ad6 smartctl 5.43 2012-06-30 r3573 [FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE i386] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-12 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Device Model: Maxtor 6Y120M0 Serial

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diskinfo tests

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Following on from the previous dd and bonnie++ tests, here are some diskinfo tests: These are unaligned tests, on disks partitioned such as this: $ gpart show ada1 => 34 488397101 ada1 GPT (232G) 34 540 – free – (270k) 574 488396510 1 freebsd (232G) 488397084 51 – free – (25k) And then aligned thusly: $ gpart show ada1 ada1s1 ada2 ada2s1 => 34 488397101 ada1 GPT (232G) 34 6 – free –

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Aligned versus not aligned

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In this post, we’re going to demonstrate why aligning your disk partitions can be a good idea. For starters, we’re going to go with the default alignment, do a test, then align, and redo the test. But first, in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, this randomly discovered post may be a useful primer. Create the scheme on the disk This command creates a GPT scheme on the drive. Create

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Aligning disk partitions for better throughput

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During a recent install of FreeBSD 9.1 onto a gmirror, it was pointed out that my disk partitions were not aligned. Today, I’ll look at how that affects performance, both before and after alignment. Last night, I installed FreeBSD 9.1 onto a separate HDD, which I’ll use as a floater. I can attach this HDD to any system I need to work on without booting from the main HDD. In attached this HDD

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Installing FreeBSD 9.1 into a gmirror

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Late last week I installed FreeBSD 9.1 onto a gmirror, which I created during the install process. I documented it via photographs and comments. Hopefully, the next time I do this, it will be useful to refer to this resource. NOTE that when I did this, the partitions were not aligned properly. See the comments in the above URL for details. I will be covering this in a future post.

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