[TriLUG] B320i RAID controller driver

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

On Fri, 22 May 2020, David Burton via TriLUG wrote:

> BTW, you said you have four 300 GB drives in a RAID 1+0 array, giving you
> 300 GB of usable storage. But RAID 1+0 should only cost you 50% of the
> total space, not 75%, so my guess is that if you look at the drives you'll
> find that they're only 150 GB each.

.
.

>> I have an HP Proliant server that has a B320i RAID controller in it.
>> There are four 300 GB SATA disks configured as a 1+0 ARRAY that
>> logically looks like one 300GB disk, which is more than enough storage
>> capacity for what I use.

you say you don't need much disk space.

<unsolicited advice>

You're about to start with a new disk setup. I assume you don't want to spend 
any more money than neccessary, but disks are cheap now. Now is a good time to 
rethink your disks. For data storage, I only buy 4TB or more. If you want to 
boot off an MSDOS partition, then it has to be 2TB.

But if you're booting you only need a small disk. I don't replicate my / or 
/usr, as they're small. I can tar them up and save them in /data or I can just 
copy them to a DVD in case the disk fails. So that would be 1 of your 300G 
disks. If you're retiring disks, you could duplicate the boot disk and put the 
spare into the case, but not powered up.

Then you could get 2 large disks and mirror them. You'll have a spare disk slot.

I don't like the idea of RAID 1+0. If a disk fails, the other disk than makes up 
the other half of the file system, doesn't have a consistent file system 
(AFAIK). You could have half of a file on the dead disk and half of the file on 
the alive disk. This means that the alive disk you can't fsck for instance and 
you can't put it on another machine to test it.

In your setup with 4 disks, I would have two mirrored pairs and mount them so 
that they make up your whole filesystem.

</unsolicited advice>

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant
map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!