On Wed, 10 Apr 2002 08:01, you wrote: but that REQUIRES, that the disks are not > hd<a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h> > You should try to avoid having more than one (active) disk at the same > controller at once. I've always wondered about this statement. The idea AFAIK is that unlike SCSI, IDE has the master drive control the slave drive on the same controller. 1) This causes problems where the drives are a different model/make/manufactuer as the master drive will downgrade the settings of the drives (master & slave) to the lowest common denominator; and therefore, the speed in this case is affected. 2) Having the master drive control the slave drive also causes problems if the master fails as then both drives fail or if a drive takes down the chain both drives fail. 3) maybe a couple of others that I have forgotten at the moment. When I was setting up my server at home 1.2GAthlon AsusA7V-133 384M RAM 9x IBM 40G drives, 1 Promise Ultra100 & 2 Promise Ultra100TX2 I did a couple of tests. I found by using a flaky drive from a previous life (a western digital that when it would die would take down the controller) that it didn't matter if the drive was a single master on a controller, a master on a shared controller or a slave on a shared controller. When the drive would fail - it would take the whole machine down with it. The Kernel would not die but it would deadlock waiting for interrupts to return and the only way to fix the issue was to hard reset. Having the flaky dirve as a standalone drive or as part of a software RAID made no difference. So I concluded that at least in my setup I gained nothing by only having one IDE drive per controller. I also ran bonnie++ tests on a software RAID0 using 4 master only drives (hde, hdg, hdi, hdk) and 4 master-slave drives (hde, hdf, hdg, hdh). The results of the test were that seek times for the master-slave case were half that for the master-master case. Read times did drop but only by about .75M/s from 80M/s but the write times improved by about .25-.75M/s from 50M/s. So I concluded that at least for my setup it was better to have the master-slave case because the loss of read speed was made up by the increase in write speed. So my final configuration was that hda, hdb were system disks. The RAID5 used hde, hdg, hdi, hdk with a hot spare hdo and the RAID0 used hdm & hdn. Now the tests weren't what I would call conclusive or proper scientific tests but I believe they were valid. I've always wondered what others have found as what I found seems to fly in the face of common rules of thumb. There is a specific mailing list "linux ide" <linux-ide-arrays@lists.math.uh.edu> that deal with large IDE arrays so you might like to also ask your question there and see what is suggested. -- Adrian Head (Public Key available on request.) _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://www.sistina.com/lvm/Pages/howto.html
