So, peterbilt’s RAID finally formatted out 100% good.<\/p>\n
We’ve learned many things from this adventure:<\/p>\n
1) PCI-X and PCIe are NOT the same connector<\/p>\n
2) When partitioning RAID devices, aligning to a 1 megabyte sector boundery helps (use 32768s in parted)<\/p>\n
3) parted is much easier to use than fdisk for certain things<\/p>\n
4) msdos disklabels are no good for volumes bigger than 2T. Use gpt disklabel instead<\/p>\n
5) onboard RAID controllers on motherboards (i.e. ‘fakeraid’) and ubuntu do not get along very well<\/p>\n
6) The RocketRaid products are not very good either although they at least work albiet very slooowly<\/p>\n
7)\u00a0 Do not ignore warnings about RAID arrays lest they become more serious warnings about RAID arrays<\/p>\n
8) mke2fs has -T largefile for files that contain mostly huge files. Saves time, makes less inodes<\/p>\n
9) -E stride=N – N is your RAID card’s stripe \/ 4. Does help. I knew this before, but was good to be reminded.<\/p>\n
10) parted needs better error checking on msdos filesystem for sector counts that wrap<\/p>\n
11) raid 50 is *incredibly* forgiving.<\/p>\n
12) On thermaltake cases, DO NOT LEAVE THE SIDE PANELS OFF! They keep drives cool to the touch when the panels are on*.. or will burn you when they are off. I figure i hastened at least two drives to their graves. I feel vaugely bad about doing a RMA on them…\u00a0 but why doesn’t SMART *report* that they’re overheating? Good equipment shuts itself down and lives on to fight another day, IMHO..<\/p>\n
13)\u00a0 Ultimately, the last ditch backup strategy that worked was to go buy a couple of 1T external disks and manually weed the directories out into <1T chunks, then pass some –exclude= lines into tar. Many many higher tech things were tried first, all failed. [But someday soon I will have one heck of a backup server. Yes, backups have now progressed in my life to where they warrent their very own server]<\/p>\n
14) Certain unnamed people were extrordinarily helpful in retaining my sanity, and were pillars of strength..<\/p>\n
15) I need to get some kind of psychological help – when the thought of losing a terabyte and a third of data is this traumatic.. I mean, literally, I haven’t slept well since this thing started.<\/p>\n
In the course of a long life, a man must be willing to abandon his baggage many times<\/em>. (probably misquoted) –Lazarus Long<\/p>\n I can’t even abandon my data..<\/p>\n * = in peterbilt’s configuration, which is eight SATA disks in 5.25″ removable caddies with individual fans<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, peterbilt’s RAID finally formatted out 100% good. We’ve learned many things from this adventure: 1) PCI-X and PCIe are NOT the same connector 2) When partitioning RAID devices, aligning to a 1 megabyte sector boundery helps (use 32768s in parted) 3) parted is much easier to use than fdisk for certain things 4) msdos […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}