Filesystem, RAID Question

Rich Fairbanks poppanecktie at gmail.com
Wed Oct 29 12:07:24 PDT 2008


Hi,

I'm new to FreeBSD (and UNIX in general), and I have read through the
handbook and various websites to gain some insight on this question, but
haven't found a concrete solution yet, and I'm hoping you guys can help.

I'm wanting to build a FreeBSD 7.0 based file server for a small/medium
company that I work for and I've got the box up and running, samba is
working fine, the only problem that I can see is that the array that I
installed (3ware 9650SE) with 3 WD 1TB SATA drives in RAID 5 seems to be
performing very slowly. This isn't just an issue of slow access over the
network for the Windows users, but when I transfer a few GB from directory
to directory on the array, or from the system disk to the array or vice
versa.

Now, this is how I set up the array. I installed the card, popped in the
drives. The card bios found the drives and allowed me to setup in RAID 5.
Then, FreeBSD booted and found the "disk" as da0. I want the entire array to
be one big chunk of space. In other words, I don't need a bunch of slices or
partitions (or DO I? I'm still very new to the whole slice vs. partition
concept)

I typed newfs /dev/da0 . A ton of numbers went across the screen, then I
mounted /dev/da0 at /usr/home/storage. It works, but perhaps I missed a step
that would have made things easier/perform better, etc.

Besides creating the file system a different way, what would be an optimum
stripe size for the array? I will using this for storing, basically, a TON
of word documents and email messages, and a few large .pst files. So, the
average file size will be in the 25-100K range, but a few 1-2GB files.

Thanks for ANY and all help. If this question has been asked and answered a
million times, please forgive me and just point me to the place where I can
read up on this issue.

Thanks,

RF


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