hardware

Benchmarking the TOSHIBA DT01ACA300

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

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

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

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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diskinfo tests

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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New server dmesg

The recently acquired parts for the server were assembled two nights ago, and FreeBSD was installed last night. I’m thinking of crowd sourcing the tuning of the ZFS monster I’m creating. Interested in watching/helping? See the FreeBSD Forums for details. Here’s the dmesg output for future reference. You will notice that (see line 154-157) one of the drives is running at only 150.000MB/s, as opposed to the other drive (lines 143-146), which is

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Server/gateway status update

Assembly of the server and the gateway have started. Both are stalled right now. The gateway is waiting for proper RAM to arrive next week. The server is waiting for an OS install and then the installation of the 8x2TB disks for the ZFS array. Server assembly Last night, while assembling the server, as I went along, I posted photos to my Twitter feed. I later posted those photographs to a Google+ album.

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How not to order RAM for your motherboard

I ordered the wrong RAM for the motherboard in my new gateway machine. When did I discover this? When I powered it up for the first time, I heard a series of 5 short beeps, 1 one beep. Looking that up in the manual and found: 5 short beeps + 1 long Memory error No memory detected in the beep system Oh. So I rechecked that the sticks were in the right slots,

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Delivery schedule

All parts for the server and the gateway have been ordered. The first deliveries are expected today. Here is the list of what arrives when. Friday 11 Jan 2013 All the internal parts for the server, except those shown below, via UPS. (delivered) Case for Gateway, via UPS. (delivered) Saturday 12 Jan 2013 The 8x2TB HDD for the server ZFS array, via FedEx. (delivered) Tuesday 15 Jan 2013 The main shipment of the

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Designing a new server, part IV

This server describe herein is now known as knew. This is the fourth in a series of posts about building a new server. What’s happened since the last post? I’ve upgraded to an LSI SAS card. Why? Better throughput. And LSI is well supported on FreeBSD. This card is not used for RAID. It is used strictly as a disk controller and the disks will be presented to the OS as JBOD. Background:

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