Practical file system size question

[Joe Landman]

On 04/17/2013 09:18 AM, Robert Bennett wrote:

[...]

> The question is - does anyone have experience with this type of
> configuration and in particular with 3TB HDDs and a file system size of
> 99TB?  The rebuild time with 2TB drives is ~ 24 hours.  Should I expect

Yes, we've built up to 240TB raw (180TB usable) xfs systems for our 
customers on our units.  Very doable, though there are some considerations.

First off, why 3TB when 4TB are in market, pretty stable ... ?  Unless 
there is a budgetary limitation you are working against, I'd advise at 
least looking at those.

Second, which LSI controllers are you using?  Firmware updates for the 
controllers to use 3TB and higher drives are pretty much mandated.  Our 
experience with various LSI cards has ranged from not so good to pretty 
good, and this is a firmware version revision dependent (along with 
driver) issue from what we found.

> the rebuild time for the 3TB drives to be ~ 36 hours?

Not in our experience.  Typically 5-10 hours depending upon RAID card 
used, RAID configuration, drives chosen, and other issues.  Its pretty 
complex, and hard to predict in advance without trying it.


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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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