Yesterday I set up one of our new storage machines for testing: Dell 2950, Quad Xeon, 8GB, 6×750 GB HDD. I installed FreeBSD 7 with ZFS (following up this article). Firstly it seemed to be a bit tricky, because the PERC/6i controller configuration is — sorry — crap from the usuability point of view. It seemed not to support non-RAID configurations, but taking a closer look it turned out to be a wrong assumption. Six RAID-0 Arrays with only one drive each is in fact the same as no RAID at all. (The reason why RAID does not make sense is, that ZFS will do this job, and its auto-healing is much better than any hardware controller’s auto-healing)
After having set up the minimal FreeBSD and doing some tuning (such as creating the ZFS volumes), I ran some tests. You won’t believe me, but writing a 10GB file (/dev/random to the ZFS volume) resulted in a transfer rate at about 160MB/sec and reading (cp testfile /dev/null) was done at a speed of more than 270MB/sec!!
To be continued…
I’ve been trying ZFS on a Dell 2950 with a PERC/5i controller.
I tried creating 6 RAID-0 arrays.
The problem i’ve been having is if I eject a hot-swap drive, the RAID0 virtual disk disappears; it doesn’t come back if I plug it
in..
Or plug in a replacement to test “swapping in a replacement drive”.
The only way i’ve found to get the drive back requires a reboot, which is troublesome…
Do you know of a way to make hot swap work like it should? (No rebooting the server)
I’m afraid I cannot really help you there. Currently I don’t have access to any Perc/5i equipped Dell machines with FreeBSD on them. I believe that there are some hotswapping issues with FreeBSD and Perc controllers (regardless whether or not ZFS is being used).
As those days hot-swap was not crucial, I haven’t even tested that.