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 […]
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:
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,
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
Flashing IT firmware for LSI 9211-8i on FreeBSD Read More »
I was looking around for warranty checking pages. I found these for my HDD: Western Digital Toshiba Seagate and Maxtor
HDD warranty checks Read More »
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
The hardware is ready. What tests to run? Read More »
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
Do you have a Seagate ST2000DM001? Read More »
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
Benchmarking the Seagate ST2000DM001 – slower hardware Read More »
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
Benchmarking the Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series DXM03B0Q – ZFS Read More »
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
Benchmarking the Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series DXM03B0Q Read More »