Disks

smartctl: Toshiba HDD serial numbers are only 9 characters

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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 […]

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Flashing IT firmware for LSI 9211-8i on FreeBSD

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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

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The hardware is ready. What tests to run?

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I think I’m now at the point where I have all the hardware assembled and it’s ready for testing. Now I’m trying to determine what set of fio tests to run. If you know of a set of standard tests, or just have some of your own, please let me know in the comments. The hardware The disks I have assembled are all available via the LSI 9211-8i. The basic hardware specs are:

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Do you have a Seagate ST2000DM001?

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Do you have Seagate ST2000DM001? This 2TB drives seems OK at straight dd output, but seems absolutely terrible at random output. If you have one, and do not mind this destructive test (IT WILL DESTROY ANY DATA ON THAT DRIVE), please let me know the results. The reason I ask is the very slow results we’re getting from a tool designed to test the throughput of an HDD based on writing data at

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Benchmarking the Seagate ST2000DM001 – slower hardware

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In the previous benchmark of the Seagate ST2000DM001 2TB HDD, I used a AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz (see the URL for complete details of the system). Today, I’m using a different system. The hardware We are testing on the following hardware: motherboard – SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL+-F Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1155 Intel C202 DDR3 1333 (manufacturer page) – $179.99 CPU – Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) 4 x

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Benchmarking the Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series DXM03B0Q – ZFS

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Following on from yesterday’s benchmark, I’m adding in some ZFS tests. All hardware is the same. Of note: $ zdb | grep ashift ashift: 9 $ sudo diskinfo -v ada0 Password: ada0 512 # sectorsize 128035676160 # mediasize in bytes (119G) 250069680 # mediasize in sectors 0 # stripesize 0 # stripeoffset 248085 # Cylinders according to firmware. 16 # Heads according to firmware. 63 # Sectors according to firmware. S12PNEACB31368P # Disk

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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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