Restoring an INOPERABLE 3Ware unit I’ve been using a 3Ware 9550SX-8LP since 2006. Over the weekend, I encountered the first problem with it. It became inoperable. That’s an overstatement, but the problem was easily fixed. After a reboot to upgrade the kernel, Nagios alerted me to a problem. I checked via the command line and …
ZFS: do not give it all your HDD I’m about to rebuild my ZFS array (which I documented in my other diary). The array has been running for a while, but I recently learned some new facts about ZFS which spurred me on to rebuilding my array with future-proofing in mind. This is my plan …
Converting a system to RAID This may well be the last article I write on this server. My existing development machine is still on 4.11. Today I will start the migration process to another server, which is already running 6.2-STABLE. In the process, I will add a RAID card to the server, and transfer the …
3Ware – Manage your RAID arrays via http 3Ware provide a good CLI to their products. I wrote about that a couple of weeks ago. They also provide a very nice web interface, available as the sysutils/3dm port. A recent discussion on the FreeBSD AMD64 mailing list brought this to my attention. I had used …
CLI for 3Ware 9550SX-8LP This article shows you how I accessed my 3Ware 9550SX-8LP controller from a command line interface. You can perform RAID maintenance from within the 3Ware BIOS, but the CLI allows you to do this while the system is up and running. This is useful for monitoring the system. I also plan …
What RAID-1 setup should I use for FreeBSD 6.0? This article will highlight the disk drive tests I ran on my ASUS A8V Deluxe. I’m about to set this machine up to do various things, including cross compiling (which I wrote about back in October). I still haven’t finished what I wanted to do, which …
Implementing Hardware RAID on FreeBSD RAID has been around for over 15 years. Why use RAID? For me, the reasons are redundancy and reliability. I don’t like disk failures. By running RAID, a disk failure will not take down my system. It still runs after a disk fails. When a disk does fail, I still …
vinum – A simple install to improve performance vinum is a great tool. As the author says: The Vinum Volume Manager is a block device driver which implements virtual disk drives. It isolates disk hardware from the block device interface and maps data in ways which result in an increase in flexibility, performance and reliability …
rawio – testing device performance After I installed vinum, I wanted to compare the performance of the vinum and non-vinum volumes. I was told about Greg Lehay’s benchmark program, rawio. From man rawio: rawio tests the speed of the low-level character I/O device special in a concurrent environment. It is intended for comparisons of storage …