Louwrentius

I made a small script that converts the output of cat /proc/mdstat to an actual date and time telling you when the RAID rebuild / reshape is finished.

This is the link to the correct version of the script.

Example:

debian:~# ./raid-rebuild-eta.sh

Estimated time of finishing rebuild / reshape:
Mon Jun 29 00:45:07 CEST 2009

So after toying around with RAID 0 just for fun, time to get serious. I created a RAID 6 of 10 x 1 TB disks. This gives me raw device read speeds of 850 MB/s and write speeds of 300 MB/s. I think this is exactly what should be expected, but boy it is damn fast. Especially the write speed surprises me.

Still, if I format the device using EXT4, write speed stays the same. However, read speed drop to about 350 MB/s. I don't understand why. Maybe some misalignment? I don't know.

UPDATE:

The issue with the dropped read speed is due to an incorrect chunk size of the array. The array now consists of 20 drives, providing 18 TB of storage using XFS. Read speads exceed 1.1 GB/s (that is not a typo) and write speeds are about 350 MB/s.

I filled the Norco case with hardware. It is now up and running, based on Debian Linux (Lenny).

I immediately performed some initial tests with software RAID 0. The results are just astounding.

debian:~# dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=50000

50000+0 records in

50000+0 records out

52428800000 bytes (52 GB) copied, 50.9222 s, 1.0 GB/s

This is correct. 1 Gigabyte per second using 10 Samsung Spinpoint F1's connected to the motherboard (4) and to the Highpoint Rocketraid 2340 (6).

I've got this fetish for storage. So I bought a case that gives me some room for future expantion. The current 6 TB RAID 6 storage server does not have any room for expantion.

This Norco RPC-4020 case with 20 hot swap drive bays does however. Don't know what to fill it with yet.