RAID 5 on Ubuntu Linux: Setup Ques on Promise TX2 card

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caffiendo

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I am setting up a File Server, and I'm thinking I would like to use the 5 160 GB drives that I have in a RAID 5 array.

I'm planning on running Ubuntu 6.10 Server (unless someone can tell me a better distro). Here is the hardware I'm planning:

MSI 865PE II MOBO (supports 4 IDE, 2 SATA)
P4 2.6Ghz
Sapphire 9200 AGP card
Promise Ultra 133 TX2 (supports 4 IDE drives)
Rosewill 4-channel SATAII (Promise based)

5 160GB WD IDE Drives
5 500GB WD SATA Drives
1 36GB Raptor (OS drive)
1 Samsung 8x DVD+-R/RW

I will have the DVD drive and a 160Gb, each on it's own channel off the MOBO. The other 4 160's will be on the Promise card.
Will this work for RAID 5 with Linux software running the RAID config?

The 5 500's are not in a RAID config.

I'm open to any comments here too! Thakns!
 
Anyone have a suggestion as to what file system to use on the server? ext2, ext3? I'm new to Linux so I'm not real sure on this.

Ok, I have the OS set up on my 36GB Raptor and now I need to figure out how to install the IDE drives on the Promise Ultra 133 TX2.
I tried "sudo mount" and "sudo fdisk -l" and I didn't see any of the 160GB IDE's that are hooked into the controller card. How do a
add these drives to the system?

Thanks!
 
I personally prefer XFS for the massive file storage, simply because it is so easy to expand (xfs_growfs /dev/sdb 10 seconds later you are done) and defrag (xfs_fsr). Beware tho, unless you enable shadow-backups, once you delete a file on XFS, it is GONE, and I do mean gone.

ext3 has the advantage of being VERY well supported, but if it needs to verify, on a large volume you are looking at HOURS. ext2 is a no-no as it doesn't support files in excess of 2GB.
 
caffiendo said:
I tried "sudo mount" and "sudo fdisk -l" and I didn't see any of the 160GB IDE's that are hooked into the controller card. How do a
add these drives to the system?

Thanks!
Click to expand...
can you run this:
Code: 
ls -l /dev |grep [sh]d
to see which HDDs are recognized by your system?
 
Try "sudo modprobe sata_promise" and then see what "sudo fdisk -l" shows.
 
I added the Rosewill SATA controller on the next reboot and when I booted the PC, the IDE drives showed up..
 
Dew said:
I personally prefer XFS for the massive file storage, simply because it is so easy to expand (xfs_growfs /dev/sdb 10 seconds later you are done) and defrag (xfs_fsr). Beware tho, unless you enable shadow-backups, once you delete a file on XFS, it is GONE, and I do mean gone.

ext3 has the advantage of being VERY well supported, but if it needs to verify, on a large volume you are looking at HOURS. ext2 is a no-no as it doesn't support files in excess of 2GB.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your input! I'm going to look into XFS. Will this work well with a RAID5 setup?

Anyone have a good guide for a noobie setting up a RAID 5 Array? Thanks
 
caffiendo said:
Anyone have a suggestion as to what file system to use on the server? ext2, ext3? I'm new to Linux so I'm not real sure on this.

Ok, I have the OS set up on my 36GB Raptor and now I need to figure out how to install the IDE drives on the Promise Ultra 133 TX2.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

You are building a very similar setup to what I have going here. I used Gentoo for my OS of choice.

This is my setup.
1 20g WD (OS Drive)
6 250g WD drives
8 320g Seagates.

The 20g WD is hooked to primary/master off mobo. 2 of the 250s are on secondary/master&slave. The other 4 are off a Promise FastTrak100.

The 8 320s are on 2 PromiseSATA 300 TX4 controllers using 2 multilane retro kits to an external tower to hold all of them.

I made the 250s a raid5 array and the 320s another raid5 array. Both have 1 drive in each array as a spare. Both are using LVM to slice up the arrays into 'partitions' for different mount points...and are using the ReiserFS file system. The ReiserFS system can be resized on fly along with LVM stuff.

I used these 2 guides to set it all up.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Software-RAID-HOWTO/

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/LVM-HOWTO/


I tried "sudo mount" and "sudo fdisk -l" and I didn't see any of the 160GB IDE's that are hooked into the controller card. How do a
add these drives to the system?
Click to expand...

Do a
Code: 
cat /proc/partitions

You should see something like this:

Code: 
hoth ~ # cat /proc/partitions 
major minor  #blocks  name

   3     0   20044080 hda
   3     1      49360 hda1
   3     2    1953504 hda2
   3     3   18041184 hda3
  22     0  245117376 hdc
  22    64  245117376 hdd
  33     0  244198584 hde
  33    64  244198584 hdf
  34     0  244198584 hdg
  34    64  244198584 hdh
   8     0  312571224 sda
   8    16  312571224 sdb
   8    32  312571224 sdc
   8    48  312571224 sdd
   8    64  312571224 sde
   8    80  312571224 sdf
   8    96  312571224 sdg
   8   112  312571224 sdh

hda = os (with partitions)
hd[c-h] = 250s
sd[a-h] = 320s

If you have it all setup like you said you were... my guess is you should see for you setup
hda = os
hdc = 160
hd[e-h] = other 160s
sda[a-e] = 500s

If you're not seeing all the drives more than likely the drivers didn't load.

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

this site can help figure out for the sata card although just glancing i didn't see rosewill listed.. but if its Promise based should be ok with those drivers.

Do a
Code: 
lsmod

to see what modules are loaded up. I config'ed my kernel to have most sata drivers loaded and some Promise drivers that I saw listed in the kernel. Also I had selected all the Raid options in the kernel to be modules and loaded them up as well at boot. Doing a
Code: 
lshw
on my machine shows me this for my drivers. Not exacalty sure how acurate this is though.

description: Mass storage controller
product: PDC40718 (SATA 300 TX4)
vendor: Promise Technology, Inc.
physical id: 8
bus info: pci@0000:00:08.0
logical name: scsi0
logical name: scsi1
logical name: scsi2
logical name: scsi3
version: 02
width: 32 bits
clock: 66MHz
capabilities: storage pm bus_master cap_list emulated
configuration: driver=sata_promise latency=72 maxlatency=18 mingnt=4

<SNIP>

description: Mass storage controller
product: PDC20267 (FastTrak100/Ultra100)
vendor: Promise Technology, Inc.
physical id: 9
bus info: pci@0000:00:09.0
version: 02
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: storage pm bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=Promise_Old_IDE latency=32
Click to expand...


Hope this helps.
 
Thank you very much! That helps a lot!

So how much more performance can I expect from a RAID 5 array for read/write? Finally can more drives be added to an array after it is configured? I have 3 more 160's, but they are busy running OS's on different computers now. I could swap them with other drives to make my RAID 5 Array larger? Will more drives in the array make it faster (I'm guessing yes..)

As far as FS's, I'm kinda in a tuff spot trying to decide which is the best bet here. I've been told XFS, ReiserFS (is this supported in Ubuntu?)
 
caffiendo said:
Thank you very much! That helps a lot!

So how much more performance can I expect from a RAID 5 array for read/write? Finally can more drives be added to an array after it is configured? I have 3 more 160's, but they are busy running OS's on different computers now. I could swap them with other drives to make my RAID 5 Array larger? Will more drives in the array make it faster (I'm guessing yes..)

As far as FS's, I'm kinda in a tuff spot trying to decide which is the best bet here. I've been told XFS, ReiserFS (is this supported in Ubuntu?)
Click to expand...


I'm not exactly sure of the performance of Raid 5. I believe Raid 0 has better performance but no fault recovery. I went with Raid 5 w/ spare disks b/c I wanted to maximize my chances of recovery from a fault.

You can expand a raid 5 array as long as you have the option in the kernel selected but it is experimental. But from experience works great.

This guide helps on that. http://gentoo-wiki.com/Resize_LVM2_on_RAID5 I used this guide to add 2 drives to an array. 1 in production and 1 as spare. I had 4 drives in the array at start.. at end, 6 w/ 1 as spare. Took a very very long time to recalculate the parity.. something like 20 hours for a 250g drive that I added in.

As to the different file systems, just saw this on Digg today. This may help or may confuse you more. ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
 
I just did some reading on the HOWTO on RAID5 install and I found this:
It is very important, that you only use one IDE disk per IDE bus. Not only would two disks ruin the performance, but the failure of a disk often guarantees the failure of the bus, and therefore the failure of all disks on that bus. In a fault-tolerant RAID setup (RAID levels 1,4,5), the failure of one disk can be handled, but the failure of two disks (the two disks on the bus that fails due to the failure of the one disk) will render the array unusable. Also, when the master drive on a bus fails, the slave or the IDE controller may get awfully confused. One bus, one drive, that's the rule.
Click to expand...

I asked earlier if it was alright to put all 4 drives on my promise card. The promise card has 2 IDE connections (2 channels, 2 drives a piece). I have one more drive on my Primary IDE channel on the MOBO. After reading the above quote, it seems that my setup is a little faulty. From what it says, I should have only one of the drives on each channel of my promise card. Correct?

Since this is the case, I have to rethink my system setup. I have another board that has RAID built onto it. The board is an Albatron 865PE Pro II. Here is my question. If I use this MOBO (which uses a Promise RAID controller as well) is it still possible to add my Promise card, so I would have a total of 6 IDE channels? This will allow me to add my 6th 160gb drive as well!

Finally can I put a DVD+-R/RW on the same channel as one of these HD's?
 
caffiendo said:
I just did some reading on the HOWTO on RAID5 install and I found this:


I asked earlier if it was alright to put all 4 drives on my promise card. The promise card has 2 IDE connections (2 channels, 2 drives a piece). I have one more drive on my Primary IDE channel on the MOBO. After reading the above quote, it seems that my setup is a little faulty. From what it says, I should have only one of the drives on each channel of my promise card. Correct?

Since this is the case, I have to rethink my system setup. I have another board that has RAID built onto it. The board is an Albatron 865PE Pro II. Here is my question. If I use this MOBO (which uses a Promise RAID controller as well) is it still possible to add my Promise card, so I would have a total of 6 IDE channels? This will allow me to add my 6th 160gb drive as well!

Finally can I put a DVD+-R/RW on the same channel as one of these HD's?
Click to expand...

I read that too but I am taking a chance I guess. The 4 drives I have my Promise card are all Maxtors so don't think they are as picky as a WD about being alone on the bus.

But I'm not overly concerned... if I lose a drive and the bus fails... I've still only lost the one drive. Power off and add a replacement for the failed drive and force a rebuild with the non-failed drive on the bus. That is what I'm guessing will happen.
 
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