Recommended NAS?

[toricred]

OK, ethtool tells me that it is in fact running at gigE speeds. The 50MB/s is for an old disk and is not what I'm worried about (it's just for the OS anyway).

I did remove the two jumpers as I have them sitting on my nightstand as I write. (Actually I just noticed that only the plastic came off and the metal must still be on there. Boy do I hate those tiny jumpers and my old eyes.) I think that may be it.

Assuming that fixes it, I'm using evms to configure it and I've created segments on both the disks as Linux segments using the DOS segment manager. When I create a region, I keep ending up with it named md0/md1. I clearly can't use that in the diskopt script. I also can't figure out how to rename it. Am I using it wrong? Am I using the wrong Region Manager?

[toricred]

That's not it, the jumpers are completely clean. The metal must be in there where I can't see them.

I used the cables that came with the motherboard. Is there a different cable to use for SATA2?

[toricred]

I've been searching for a reason that it just doesn't seem much faster than the ATA133 drive and I think I found a clue. The following is from dmesg and appears to me that the drive is being set to ATA133 for some reason. Is there a way to change that?

39.477498] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 39.520929] ata1.00: ATA-7: MAXTOR STM3500630AS, 3.AAE, max UDMA/133
[ 39.520932] ata1.00: 976773168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
[ 39.595812] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by toricred

I've been searching for a reason that it just doesn't seem much faster than the ATA133 drive and I think I found a clue. The following is from dmesg and appears to me that the drive is being set to ATA133 for some reason. Is there a way to change that?

39.477498] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
[ 39.520929] ata1.00: ATA-7: MAXTOR STM3500630AS, 3.AAE, max UDMA/133
[ 39.520932] ata1.00: 976773168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
[ 39.595812] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133

This is odd. What distro/kernel are you using? What exact motherboard model?

PS I thought you said this was a 7200.10? The dmesg report does not indicate that. It looks like a diamondmax 21. They are different than the 7200.10. IS it made in china or thailand?



thx
mike

[toricred]

I'm using Ubuntu 7.0.4 Server 64 bit. The motherboard is: a Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSHN2 with an AMD X2 3800+ and 1GB of memory. I've ordered a PCI-E AHCI (JM636 chipset) controller and SATA2 cables from Newegg. I'd love to find out I don't have to use them, but I'm beginning to wonder.

I ordered 7200.10. It turns out I received diamondmax 21. What's the difference?

[gplasky]

You may want to check in your BIOS. Sometimes there is a setting to present the SATA drive as an ATA drive or present them as pure ACHI. In my BIOS it says when you choose ACHI that will only work in Vista.

Gerry

[toricred]

I can't find any settings like that in my BIOS (I thought it might be that it was set to emulate PATA). When I get the AHCI card on Tuesday that shouldn't be an issue. I really hope that is it.

[gplasky]

And the answer may be obvious but I didn't see it in your postings. You are using these nVidia specific drivers?

Linux nForce Drivers

 
All of the following drivers are open-source and are included in most popular Linux distributions. 
In most cases, the Linux installer will select the appropriate driver for the detected nForce hardware. 

Component Platform Use this driver 
Audio (AC97) nForce-1 – nForce-4=intel8x0.c 
Audio (HDA) nForce-430 and later=hda_intel.c 
  
Storage SATA=sata_nv.c 
ACHI=ahci.c 
IDE=amd74xx.c 
  
Ethernet All=forcedeth.c 

NVIDIA also provides pre-compiled storage (sata_nv) and Ethernet (forcedeth) driver disc images that may be required during the initial Linux installation. 
These driver disc images are provided for certain commercially-supported Linux distributions. 
The driver disc images often times contain certain upgrades and bug fixes that were not available at the time the original distributions began shipping. 
If you plan to install Linux via NVIDIA networking or NVIDIA storage, then these pre-compiled drivers must be installed during installation. 

The following table provides information and a download link for these NVIDIA drivers in pre-compiled binary, RPM, and source code form for various Linux distributions. 
These drivers have been fully tested with the nForce Professional Series. Usage on other nForce chipsets will work, but should be considered as beta. 

Version: 1.23
Release Date: June 25, 2007
Download V 1.23 

Supported Distributions: 

SLES 10 (2.6.16.21) 
RHEL 3 UP7 (2.4.21-40) 
RHEL 4 UP4 (2.6.9-42) 
RHEL 4 UP5 (2.6.9-55) 
Fedora Core 5 (2.6.15-1) 
RHEL 3 UP8 (2.4.21-47) 
SuSE 10.2 (2.6.18.2) 
RHEL 5 (2.6.18-1)

version 1.23 drivers

I'm not a Linux expert so forgive if my questions are obvious.



Gerry

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by toricred

I'm using Ubuntu 7.0.4 Server 64 bit. The motherboard is: a Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSHN2 with an AMD X2 3800+ and 1GB of memory. I've ordered a PCI-E AHCI (JM636 chipset) controller and SATA2 cables from Newegg. I'd love to find out I don't have to use them, but I'm beginning to wonder.

I ordered 7200.10. It turns out I received diamondmax 21. What's the difference?

The 7200.10's are faster... I think the DM21's are basically older IDE drives with an SATA bridge glued on. That may be why you are seeing the ATA 133 message. That also means no NCQ or PM or other unqiuely SATA features work.

So is the problem speed of the RAID0 array? What are you seeing exactly? Did you try my diskopt.sh script? You're running XFS right?

Thanks,
Mike

[toricred]

I'm running XFS and the speed I'm seeing is the same as the speed I see with my Windows XP and SATA 1.5 drives. I was really hoping for an improvement. It appears I messed up on the drives. The reviews on Newegg had people saying they were really 7200.10 with the Maxtor name on them. That must be where I got confused.

If I get Samba tweaked well, should I see a speed improvement over using Windows XP sharing?

The problem with trying to use the Nvidia drivers is that I'm running Ubuntu and they don't have drivers for it. I was thinking of going to Opensuse 10.2. Would the SLES drivers work there?

Do I need to get better drives and if so, any recommendations?

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by toricred

I'm running XFS and the speed I'm seeing is the same as the speed I see with my Windows XP and SATA 1.5 drives. I was really hoping for an improvement. It appears I messed up on the drives. The reviews on Newegg had people saying they were really 7200.10 with the Maxtor name on them. That must be where I got confused.

If I get Samba tweaked well, should I see a speed improvement over using Windows XP sharing?

The problem with trying to use the Nvidia drivers is that I'm running Ubuntu and they don't have drivers for it. I was thinking of going to Opensuse 10.2. Would the SLES drivers work there?

Do I need to get better drives and if so, any recommendations?

One thing at a time... :-)

1) what speed are you seeing now through samba?

2) Assuming you have a fast enough cpu (you do) and enough dram (you do) and fast enough disk hardware (not clear yet), you should be able to get 40-50 MBytes/sec over a gigabit ethernet network.

3) Ubuntu is a fine distro. I prefer suse, but I think kjake uses ubuntu and may be able to help...

4) What stripe size did you use when building the array? Any special settings used when you formatted with xfs?

5) What kernel are you using?

The dm21's are fine disks, but just not as fast as a 7200.10.

Seagate rebadged a lot of 7200.10's as maxtors. The way to tell is look at the box and see if they came from china (dm21) or thailand (7200.10) Still, you should be able to assemble them with raid into a system that delivers more than enough performance for this task.

6) If one is a 7200.10 and the other a dm21, that is not good however. Pls check that...

thx
mike

[toricred]

Sorry, just a little frustration coming out thinking I had bought the wrong hardware.

1. I'm seeing like 2 MB/s from my Vista wireless (802.11g) laptop and I'm not certain how to get a solid speed rating from my XP boxes, but when I try to move a large file (300MB) it takes the same time (~2:20) going to my XP server or the NAS from an XP client. Thus I'm assuming that there's been no speed improvement.

2. I finally got an opportunity to add the second GB of memory so I'm now at 2GB on the NAS box.

3. Good, my only concern is if I need to use the nvidia drivers which aren't available for ubuntu (the only distro that has those drivers available and specifically supports evms seems to be suse).

4. The chunk size was 128K, the rest I left as default. Maybe that is the problem? I just used the gui to format as xfs with no added options.

5. The kernel is vanilla 2.6.22.4 with no patches.

6. They both came from Thailand and on the bottom they say Seagate 7200.10 series 3.5.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by toricred

Sorry, just a little frustration coming out thinking I had bought the wrong hardware.

1. I'm seeing like 2 MB/s from my Vista wireless (802.11g) laptop and I'm not certain how to get a solid speed rating from my XP boxes, but when I try to move a large file (300MB) it takes the same time (~2:20) going to my XP server or the NAS from an XP client. Thus I'm assuming that there's been no speed improvement.

2. I finally got an opportunity to add the second GB of memory so I'm now at 2GB on the NAS box.

3. Good, my only concern is if I need to use the nvidia drivers which aren't available for ubuntu (the only distro that has those drivers available and specifically supports evms seems to be suse).

4. The chunk size was 128K, the rest I left as default. Maybe that is the problem? I just used the gui to format as xfs with no added options.

5. The kernel is vanilla 2.6.22.4 with no patches.

6. They both came from Thailand and on the bottom they say Seagate 7200.10 series 3.5.

Ok. The good news is that these are rebadged 7200.10's then. I don't know why the kernel is reporting UDMA/133, but any case that is not your problem.

128KB chunk is great. It's pretty close to optimum for these kinds of media files. So that is not your problem.

XFS with default settings is right too, at least if called from EVMS. So that is not your problem.

But I do think I know what your problem is. Your problem is that your "G" wireless link is delivering only 16 mbps, which is quite good for G BTW. You are expecting way too much from wireless. Note that 2 MBytes/sec is 16 mbits/sec. That's darn good as I said before, for "G".

Take your client and hook it up with Gigabit ethernet and I think you'll see MUCH faster operation. No NAS is going to improve the performance of a wireless link.

Thanks,
Mike

[toricred]

I would like to figure out the UDMA/133 problem, but that isn't crucial and hopefully will go away when I get a better SATA2 controller this week.

I wasn't as concerned with the wireless speed, the problem was that I didn't have a way to verify speed other than ballpark with the connected clients (they're all XP). I did some manual timings last night as was getting 20-27MB/s with them so I think I'm alright now.

Unfortunately while I was finishing this up the OS drive in my server decided to start to fail so I'll have to get that taken care of first. The good news is that since I have this new wonderful NAS to store my files I can use one of my old data drives. (Now all I have to do is get the server up long enough to move data files.)

Thanks for all the help.

[mikesm]

Since folks here were chasing their tails because of this:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/08/26/1628200.shtml

[toricred]

Well, I'm still working on getting the server back up and running but I have good news on the NAS project. When I backed up ~7GB of data prior to beginning the rebuild, I was able to get just over 30MB/s to the server. That is certainly a good start.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by toricred

Well, I'm still working on getting the server back up and running but I have good news on the NAS project. When I backed up ~7GB of data prior to beginning the rebuild, I was able to get just over 30MB/s to the server. That is certainly a good start.

Not too bad. :-) Did you tweak samba setup and run diskopt.sh (modded for your config) yet?

Thanks,
Mike

PS 30 MB/s is about 240 Mbits/sec.... That smokes any of the small NAS drives out there, and can run linux apps as well. But the big win behind this will be RAID5 support in the future, etc...

PPS How did this compare with the old XP based server?

[toricred]

I did tweak samba, but may have a little more research to don on that. I forgot to run your diskopt.sh script, but I need to figure out how to get it to run on startup (I guess I'll add it to rc.local).

I obviously didn't set it up for RAID5 since I only had 2 drives. By the way, how easy would it be to convert from RAID0 to RAID5 in evms (I'm guessing back up all the data, wipe and start over).

The old XP server is about 15-20MB/s so this is a big improvement. I'd still like to get more since I'm doing HD and I'm not sure the NAS can handle it at the moment. I'm hoping the true SATA2 will help that too.

[coppit]

Just to throw in my two cents... I built a nice server using unRaid for under $400 (not including the drives). My beef with hardware RAID is that if something goes wrong, you lose everything. With unRaid, even in the unlikely event of a simultaneous two drive failure, I can still pull the data off the remaining drives. I also didn't like the price/storage ratio of RAID-5, and the closed nature of the commercial systems.

I blogged about my setup here. If I had to do it again, I would get a motherboard with a faster bus... I/O is the bottleneck.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by toricred

I did tweak samba, but may have a little more research to don on that. I forgot to run your diskopt.sh script, but I need to figure out how to get it to run on startup (I guess I'll add it to rc.local).

I obviously didn't set it up for RAID5 since I only had 2 drives. By the way, how easy would it be to convert from RAID0 to RAID5 in evms (I'm guessing back up all the data, wipe and start over).

The old XP server is about 15-20MB/s so this is a big improvement. I'd still like to get more since I'm doing HD and I'm not sure the NAS can handle it at the moment. I'm hoping the true SATA2 will help that too.

Here's a very interesting story: http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardwar.../2031234.shtml

What firmware revs are your drives?

Thanks,
mike