The traditional thoughts on ZFS are to have arrays which are a power-of-2 when it comes to number of disks. That means 2, 4, 8, etc. But for raidz1, that would be 3, 5, 9. For my choice of raidz2, it would be 4, 6, and 10. In the system I’m building up now, I have an 8-port LSI SATA/SAS 9211-8i 6Gb/s card. I can add two more HDD by attaching them to […]
ZFS: raidz2 with 8 or 10 disks? Read More »
I noticed this in my logs today: May 22 14:04:39 bast smartd[1577]: Device: /dev/ad0, Failed SMART usage Attribute: 9 Power_On_Hours. Oh. Really? I looked at the output of smartctl and found: This HDD is part of a gmirror: $ gmirror status Name Status Components mirror/gm0 COMPLETE ad0 ad2 How’s ad2 doing? That seems OK. Regardless of the status, I can do nothing for a week. I’m out of town. I do have several
smartctl: FAILING_NOW Read More »
One of the challenges of providing hands-on demonstrations is giving everyone their own sandbox to play in. I don’t want people to spend time on installing software. I want people to learn about the software in question, specifically Bacula. With this in mind, I’ve been building up a solution based on FreeBSD 9.1, ZFS, and jails. My solution is pretty nifty, but I don’t think it’s anything special. The key is simplicity. The
The Bacula Tutorial jail server Read More »
I woke up to this today. Complicating the matter: this server is destined to be transported tomorrow morning. This is FreeBSD 8.2 I guess the good news is: But wait, is that gpt/disk04-live really /dev/ada5? Yes. Yes it is: After a question from Peter Wemm on Twitter, I added: Full smartctl output follows:
Oh oh, a sector problem Read More »
As you’ll no doubt know, I’ve recently bought two new computer, and built them up. I’ve settled on the Toshiba 3TB DT01ACA300 HDD as my drive of choice for these systems. I ran a few tests recently and found some interesting results. I haven’t published them here yet. My main test is a database load. I just take an 8GB text file and create a PostgreSQL database from it. The file in question
same HDD, different server, +50% performance hit Read More »
While on a recent trip, logcheck started telling me about a problem: Mar 19 07:26:55 bast smartd[1573]: Device: /dev/ad0, Failed SMART usage Attribute: 9 Power_On_Hours. Looking at the full output: On line 59, you’ll see that this drive has been in use for 7.4 years. Other than that, it seems to be OK. This link seems to indicate there is nothing to worry about. This system dates from at least October 2005. It
This harddrive is getting on in life Read More »
About a week ago, I was doing some HDD benchmark tests and I accidentally specified the boot drive as the source for a test. Oops. Everything was OK. Until I rebooted. It would not boot. I figured I knew what happend. I’d munged my boot code. And I knew how to fix it. However, I didn’t realize that I’d also deleted the boot partition. I asked on the FreeBSD dev IRC channel. db
Oops, I deleted my boot partition Read More »
I’ve been testing drives lately. Mostly hard disks, but also one solid state drive. The test itself is automated, but manually started. That’s because it requires a reboot between each run. That restricts testing time to certain hours of the day. I’d like to automate this. Today I had what may be a clever solution: Use the @reboot feature of crontab(5) to start a script after reboot In that script, cd to a
Automating that regression testing Read More »
I noticed today that the serial number for Toshiba drives, as retrieved by smartctl(8) is not the whole serial number. I am not sure why. I discovered this when I went to check the warranty information for a drive. The drive is fine; I just wanted to check. Using smartctl, I got this: Right there, on line 7, you can see the serial number. Count it. It’s 9 characters. Now visit the Toshiba
smartctl: Toshiba HDD serial numbers are only 9 characters Read More »
The LSI 9211-8i 6Gb/s SATA +SAS HBA, which I recently obtained, is running the stock IR (Integrated RAID) firmware. In order to use the disks in strictly passthrough mode and avoid having any metadata written to them by the card, the card needs to be changed over to IT (Initiator Target) firmware. I had heard about this before. And I’ve read it about it on the From 32 to 2 ports: Ideal SATA/SAS
Flashing IT firmware for LSI 9211-8i on FreeBSD Read More »