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PostPosted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 7:22 am 
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Location: Leicester, UK
I have four 1 TB SATA disks connected to a 3Ware 9500S-4LP RAID controller card. They are configured as two separate units with pairs of disks in RAID 1 (mirrored). I'd like to combine all four disks into a RAID 10 array which entails combining the two existing units. However, there does not seem to be support for this procedure at BIOS level. Instead, it looks like it needs to be done using the 3DM2 Disk Management software.

My M2 NAS boots from a USB stick and has no drives other than four disks attched to the RAID card. So, what's the best way to proceed? The first option is to just forget about RAID 10 and keep two separate 1 TB RAID 1 drives. The second is to set up some sort of bootable drive (hard disk, CD-ROM, Flash drive) and run the Disk Management software from that.

I'd be grateful for any thoughts and specific guidance on how best to proceed with the second option.

Many thanks,

Raymond


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 31, 2010 8:40 am 
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Location: Sheffield UK
leicray wrote:
I have four 1 TB SATA disks connected to a 3Ware 9500S-4LP RAID controller card. They are configured as two separate units with pairs of disks in RAID 1 (mirrored). I'd like to combine all four disks into a RAID 10 array which entails combining the two existing units. However, there does not seem to be support for this procedure at BIOS level. Instead, it looks like it needs to be done using the 3DM2 Disk Management software.

My M2 NAS boots from a USB stick and has no drives other than four disks attched to the RAID card. So, what's the best way to proceed? The first option is to just forget about RAID 10 and keep two separate 1 TB RAID 1 drives. The second is to set up some sort of bootable drive (hard disk, CD-ROM, Flash drive) and run the Disk Management software from that.

I'd be grateful for any thoughts and specific guidance on how best to proceed with the second option.

Many thanks,

Raymond


Raymond

You are quite right you would have to use the 3DM2 software to do this and be warned it will take a fair amount of time to do this. I recently grew a raid5 array from 4 to 5 disks for a friend using that method and it took over a week to complete. We had to install a seperate HD with Win XP on it just to do this very task (we got the xp to boot by changing the boot order in the bios so that we didnt mess with the NL system at all). one good thing about the 3ware cards is that once you set the migration going it will continue in the background so that you could boot up the NL box and use it at least that was true for growing the R5 array but you are changing the whole scheme of things there so it may not hold true. You may also find that NL will not see the new array correctly and will want the thing re formated, We also found that growing the array was fine but the partition table did not reflect the new size so it would have had to have the tables modified with a linux live cd and whatever utility could be found to do this job and as I aint a linux expert we ended up reformatting the array and copying the data back to it ( we had already backed it up to my backup server before we started).

Do you have anywhere you can copy the data to and then just generate the array you want from scratch reformat in Nl and copy the data back it would be far quicker that way.

Hope this helps a little

Doug


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 5:41 am 
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Location: Leicester, UK
Hi Doug,

Many thanks for your thoughts. I do have the space to backup the data elsewhere, so I think that it will be easier to start over, rather than to convert.

If that's the route that I take, what are your thoughts on RAID 5 versus RAID 10? The former is not fault-tolerant until the array is rebuilt, but the latter is though at the expense of reduced storage capacity. Do you have any real-life experience of problems with either?

Raymond


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 10:45 am 
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Location: Sheffield UK
leicray wrote:
Hi Doug,

Many thanks for your thoughts. I do have the space to backup the data elsewhere, so I think that it will be easier to start over, rather than to convert.

If that's the route that I take, what are your thoughts on RAID 5 versus RAID 10? The former is not fault-tolerant until the array is rebuilt, but the latter is though at the expense of reduced storage capacity. Do you have any real-life experience of problems with either?

Raymond


Raymond

Raid 5 with 4 x 1TB drives will give you 3 TB storage but with a performance hit ( I dont notice much of that and still get 60-80 MB/s tramsfers so is acceptable) Raid 10 will give you good performance but with 2TB of storage. The difference I dont think is that significant in Performance issues but can be I still get arround 70-80 MB/s with the R1 arrays in the secondary machine.

Me I think I would go with a R5 and see how it goes at least you will gain a TB of space. Just dont delete your backups until you are satisfied as to how it is going.

Doug


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 2:32 pm 
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Location: Leicester, UK
Hi Doug,

I decided to go with RAID 10 in the end.

I did try RAID 5 but found that NL-M2 subdivided the 3 TB into two drives of 2 TB and 1 TB but one of my goals was to have a single NAS disk. I guess that I ran up against the 2 TB limit of 32-bit systems. Must look out for a 64-bit processor and board.

Raymond


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 2:52 pm 
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Joined: Sun Apr 02, 2006 9:05 pm
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Location: Up State NY in the USA!!!!
That was not NL but the card its self that did that to you. The card you have will only export 2TB and smaller volumes.

Mike


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 01, 2011 3:28 pm 
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Location: Scotland
I suggest that you check the auto-carving setting in the card's BIOS - it sounds as if it is set to 2TB. I have had a 4.04TB volume successfully exporting using a 9500S-12.


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 2:17 am 
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NickC wrote:
I suggest that you check the auto-carving setting in the card's BIOS - it sounds as if it is set to 2TB. I have had a 4.04TB volume successfully exporting using a 9500S-12.


I also have a larger array than that at 13.7Tib exported so definately do as nick says and check the autocarving setting.

Doug


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PostPosted: Sun Jan 02, 2011 3:55 am 
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Location: Leicester, UK
Thanks to NickC and to Doug for the advice about auto-carving. The card was indeed set to carve into 2 TB chunks. I've disabled that and NL is currently formatting a single 3TB RAID 5 drive.

Raymond


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 9:48 am 
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Location: Leicester, UK
Okay, something is still not right.

With RAID 5 and RAID 10 I'm getting write rates of only around 3MB/second. It used to be around 10 times that when I had just two disks in a RAID 1 array. The RAID card is using the latest firmware so that's not the issue. My Netgear gigabit switch is indicating that both my PC and NL are networked at gigabit speeds.

Is it time to throw in the towel and configure the four disks as a pair of RAID 1 arrays?

Thanks,

Raymond


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 10:08 am 
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Location: gods own country
are you sure there is nothing in the network that is dragging the speed down - if a 100 switch or a bad cable was in the system would that not do what is happening even though the cards are reporting 1000, the transfer will be as fast as the slowest part of the system


i had better add - i think :D


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 10:23 am 
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Location: Leicester, UK
Hi Tony,

Thanks for the advice. I'm using the same switch and cable as before so there is no reason to suspect that something external to NL is dragging the speed down. There has been a loss of speed only since playing around with the RAID configuration.

On the other hand, I did also upgrade to version 1.64 of NL-M2 at the same time. That should have made no difference, but who knows. Of course, I should have gone along with "if ain't broke, don't fix it".

Raymond


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 10:30 am 
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Location: gods own country
but a bad network cable could certainly bring the speed down - yes it worked before but in disturbing the system anything can have happened - 100 uses 2 pairs - 1000 all 4 pairs - one bad connection and that could be enough

a long shot i guess but worth checking

if not that then i guess go back to what you had on the original RAID and even go back to the older naslite [one thing at a time though] if that fixes it then you have an answer - if not then its also an answer of sorts


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 1:09 pm 
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Joined: Fri Dec 18, 2009 10:08 am
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Location: Sheffield UK
leicray wrote:
Okay, something is still not right.

With RAID 5 and RAID 10 I'm getting write rates of only around 3MB/second. It used to be around 10 times that when I had just two disks in a RAID 1 array. The RAID card is using the latest firmware so that's not the issue. My Netgear gigabit switch is indicating that both my PC and NL are networked at gigabit speeds.

Is it time to throw in the towel and configure the four disks as a pair of RAID 1 arrays?

Thanks,

Raymond


Raymond

What stripe size have you set for the R5 array also have you got write caching turned on would suggest you go with a stripe of 64 or bigger and definately turn on Caching it has been seen to make a difference, see http://www.serverelements.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3451&start=0

There is no reason why you shouldnt be hitting 60-70MB/s transfers.

Doug


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 03, 2011 4:41 pm 
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Location: Scotland
Has the array finished initialising yet?


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