Louwrentius

Just a small post.

To benchmark your Linux software RAID array as setup with MDADM, please use my new benchmark script. I used this script to create these results.

You may need to configure some values within the header of this file to make it fit your enviroment.

 DEVICES="/dev/sd[a-f]"
 NO_OF_DEVICES=6
 ARRAY=/dev/md5
 CHUNKS="4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024"
 MOUNT=/storage
 LOG=/var/log/raid-test.log
 LOGDEBUG=/var/log/raid-test-debug.log
 LEVEL="0 5 6 10"
 TESTFILE=$MOUNT/test.bin
 TESTFILESIZE=10000 (IN MB, thus this is 10 GB)
 TRIES=5 (how many times to run a benchmark.)

By default, the script wil format the array using XFS, feel free to format it with another filesystem such as EXT4 or EXT3 or whatever you want to test.

For those who are running Debian Lenny and want to order the new Dell R410 server, beware!

There is no safe solution to get Debian Lenny working with the on-board Broadcom network cards. A fairly recent kernel is required. Basically, you will have to install back-ported kernels, more recent modules and thus must violate the reasons why you were running Debian Lenny in the first place.

There is one solution, although it may not be an option: run VMware on the hardware and run Debian Lenny in a virtual machine. I think that in most cases, this will be sufficient for many cases and it has all the benefits of virtualisation and the stability of Debian Lenny.

It is unfortunate that Broadcom or Dell do not support Debian.

If you do have an easy and quite safe solution to get the Broadcom network cards working with Debian Lenny, please drop a note.

Beware though: the H200 and H700 RAID controllers are also not supported by Debian Lenny.

dell-s300-h200-and.html