Well... I wasn't sure what the best choice was, given the circumstances. This isn't an array for production, just development or (more likely) testing. And the big thing is, I'm re-using existing equipment, and I had 8 300 GB 15K RPM drives, and no further replacements handy. One can probably get those drives if need be, but the City wouldn't likely pony up the cost. So I figured I'd use only 7 drives with one spare for RAID5. I could have gone RAID6 on eight drives for the same capacity, but when one drive fails I'll be back to RAID5 (sort of) anyway.<div>
<br></div><div>Just out of curiosity, where would you get HP 300 GB 15K RPM "universal hot swap" drives from, and what do they cost these days? I see on eBay one listing for US$350/drive.</div><div><br></div><div>
Kevin<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Trevor Cordes <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:trevor@tecnopolis.ca">trevor@tecnopolis.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im">On 2011-05-19 Kevin McGregor wrote:<br>
> I installed Ubuntu Server 10.04.2 LTS AMD64 on a HP ProLiant ML370 G3<br>
> (4 x dual-core/hyperthreaded Xeon 2.66 GHz, 8 GB RAM) and I used the<br>
> on-board SCSI controller to manage 8 x 300 GB 15K RPM SCSI drives in<br>
> a software RAID 5 set up as a 7-drive array with 1 hot-spare drive.<br>
> All drives are the exact same model with the same firmware version.<br>
><br>
> It's currently rebuilding the array (because I just created the<br>
> array) and /proc/mdstat is reporting "finish=165.7min<br>
> speed=25856K/sec". Does that sound "right" in the sense that it's the<br>
<br>
</div>I got around 20-30M/s or so on my RAID6 7200rpm 12TB 8-disk rebuild this<br>
week. That was on an old Pentium-D but with a nifty zippy new 8-port<br>
SATA card. Your speeds sound a touch slow, given the hardware. But<br>
RAID5/6 does weird things behind the scenes.<br>
<br>
Note, if you're doing 8 drives anyhow, why not RAID6? Its<br>
survivability is much higher and its performance is surprisingly nearly<br>
that of RAID5 (there's some graphs somewhere I was recently looking<br>
at). The only downside is degraded performance sucks, but hopefully<br>
you will never be in that state (long). I've personally had/seen 2<br>
RAID5 failures and will never use anything except RAID6 now.<br>
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