On Saturday, October 27, 2012 7:49:13 PM UTC+1, Rolf Larsson wrote:
Sorry, I meant I'm filling the unit up with the test script you posted :-)
I've managed to fill the new unit to the brim (just doing one disk, I assume it'll work on the other one)
# df -h |grep sdb2
/dev/sdb2 2.7T 2.7T 0 100% /mnt/sdb2
I also started to fill the remaining part of the JBOD file system on the one I did first. It's taking ages :-) So far, so good:
# df -h|grep md0
/dev/md0 5.4T 4.5T 866.7G 84% /mnt/md0
OK, you can stop doing that lengthy tests, everything seems to be OK,
Saya must have done something wrong with his filesystem.
Answers to your Questions:
> This is the linux kernel responsibility, not Alt-F.
True, but I assume you can still 'lock' certain devices to specific designations which may be beneficial in this case, when the hardware is the same 'everywhere' - ie, if right bay is always SDA and left always SDB,
No it is not. (reviewing the post: ah, you really mean uppercase sda?)
It happened to me once that sdb was the USB disk, sba the right and sdc
the left disk. We have no control over that, it is the kernel that
assigns it, and that depends on the spin-up time -- larger disks might
take several seconds to present themselves to the system
What I could do is to establish a link to the "right" device, say, I
could link /dev/sda to /dev/right, /dev/left to /dev/sdb, and then
always use /dev/right and /dev/left. This is done by some distributions
for CD/DVD, as its name is system dependent. But I can't link /dev/sdc
to /dev/usb, because you can connect several USB disks through a USB hub
to the box, and then what would I call them?
The solution is to assign a label to each fillesystem, say sda2 will be Users, sdb2 Media, etc.
This issue has plagued the linux community for a while (it still does),
nowadays disks are used by its UUID or name, e.g.
root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3500413AS_6VMT70FK-part2
Network names suffer the same problem, e.g. eth0 and eth1 are not
guaranteed to always refers to the same physical network drive, so
'udev' has some rules for persistent devices names.
> there's less risk of confusing the two.
That's why a 'Bay' entry appears in all pages :-)
> But only the right disk is handled, right? i.e., only messages regarding it appears?
Yes, of course.
> Good. Is the filesystem creation predicted time (31 minutes) correct? or near correct?
Not entirely sure - in Test 1, it was still unresponsive after many hours, although it said it would take 31 minutes. In Test 2, I believe it may hve been something like 40 minutes for the first disk, no idea about the other one as I went to bed after kicking it off.
I'll keep an eye on it for the other ones.
My "forecast" was done observing formatting times from my old 80GB
disks, so it is very likely that they are plain wrong for big
filesystems.
> This means that you are not going to test the wizard with RAID1? :-(
Filling up = filling up with test script. See above :-)
I plan on doing RAID1 and JBOD, and perhaps RAID 5 (though I can only test that with an external smaller disk). However, this takes a nightmarish amount of waiting time. I'm almost wondering if I shouldn't have bought a more modern unit with better throughput =)
I'll keep you posted on the (slow) progress.
Thanks.
Remember, you can now skip the "filling the drive with data" test.
RAID is going to be slow, as the sync process typically runs at 15GB/s
(or is it 50GB/s?), and 5.4TB takes... hmmm, not enough fingers :-)
I attach (*) the fix to the "fdisk: device has more than 2^32 sectors, can't
use all of them" error message. Do you mind trying it?
Also, please
watch the Disk Partitioner, Filesystem Maintenance, RAID and Status page
for similar error messages.
(*) I'm having problems attaching files, I will wait until I receive the post by e-mail and I will then try to attach it.