Mailing List Archive

> I can't seem to find this anywhere. I'm lookin got build a large file
> server (24 discs), with two jbods (scsi). I was considering software
> raid, but I can't seem to find out what the max number of discs a 2.4
> or 2.6 kernel would take. Anyone know of the top of their heads? I've
> been dissappointed with the various hardware based raid systems I've
> tried, and a nice fast gentoo install shouldn't have any probs with
> speed. This machine would be dedicated to file serving, so I wouldn't
> be stealing cpu cycles from other processes.....
>

Well, I've configed around 90 drives on a couple of Altix systems
under Red Hat 2.4.xx and SuSE 2.6.x, dual-ported without issue.
(A few out of the 100 drives were flakely.)

But I've limited the total number of drives to what made sense
for a RAID5 setup with spares. Striped them down the jbods
(rather than the traditional across) as it's faster for sustained
reads and sustained writes of large files. Oh, XFS filesystem.

These weren't SCSI, rather fibre channel jbods/interfaces.
And they were rather small - 9GB drives, so it wasn't quite
a full terabyte.

Bob

--
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list

Thanks for the tips :)
Yeah, we've started using XFS on our larger arrays (anything over a
terabyte), since all of our old stuff was SGI, nice to keep using the
same file systems.

-Drew


On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 08:43:57 -0700, Bob Sanders <rsanders@engr.sgi.com> wrote:
>
>
> > I can't seem to find this anywhere. I'm lookin got build a large file
> > server (24 discs), with two jbods (scsi). I was considering software
> > raid, but I can't seem to find out what the max number of discs a 2.4
> > or 2.6 kernel would take. Anyone know of the top of their heads? I've
> > been dissappointed with the various hardware based raid systems I've
> > tried, and a nice fast gentoo install shouldn't have any probs with
> > speed. This machine would be dedicated to file serving, so I wouldn't
> > be stealing cpu cycles from other processes.....
> >
>
> Well, I've configed around 90 drives on a couple of Altix systems
> under Red Hat 2.4.xx and SuSE 2.6.x, dual-ported without issue.
> (A few out of the 100 drives were flakely.)
>
> But I've limited the total number of drives to what made sense
> for a RAID5 setup with spares. Striped them down the jbods
> (rather than the traditional across) as it's faster for sustained
> reads and sustained writes of large files. Oh, XFS filesystem.
>
> These weren't SCSI, rather fibre channel jbods/interfaces.
> And they were rather small - 9GB drives, so it wasn't quite
> a full terabyte.
>
> Bob
>
> --
> gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
>
>

--
gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list