Re: Best use of second controller with faster disks?

On Jun 13, 2007, at 10:36 PM, Francisco Reyes wrote:

>> FreeBSD, indeed. The vendor, Partners Data Systems, did a wonderful
>
> This one?
> http://www.partnersdata.com
>

that's the one.

>> job ensuring that everything integrated well to the point of
>> talking with various FreeBSD developers, LSI engineers, etc., and
>> sent me a fully tested system end-to-end with a Sun X4100 M2, LSI
>> 4Gb Fibre card, and their RAID array, with FreeBSD installed
>> already.
>
> Is there a management program in FreeBSD for the Areca card?
> So I understand the setup you are describing..
> Machine has Areca controller
> Connects to external enclosure
> Enclosure has LSI controller

In the past I've had systems with RAID cards: LSI and Adaptec. The
LSI 320-2X is the fastest one I've ever had. The adaptec ones suck
because there is no management software for them on the newer cards
for freebsd, especially under amd64.

The system I'm working on now is thus:

Sun X4100 M2 with an LSI 4Gb fibre channel card connected to an
external self-contained RAID enclosure, the Triton RAID from Partners
Data. The Triton unit has in it an Areca SATA RAID controller and 16
disks.

>> I have separate disks built-in to the system for boot.
>
> How did you get FreeBSD to newfs such a large setup?
> newfs -s /dev/raw-disk?

It is only 2Tb raw, 1.7Tb formatted :-) I just used sysinstall to
run fdisk, label, and newfs for me. Since it is just postgres data,
no file will ever be larger than 1Gb I didn't need to make any
adjustments to the newfs parameters.

>
> What are the speed/size of the disks?
> 7K rpm?

I splurged for the 10kRPM drives, even though they are smaller 150Gb
each.