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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New server dmesg

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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

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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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