On 05/20/13 00:52, Hugo Osvaldo Barrera wrote: > Hi, > > I'm building myself an openbsd-based fileserver, which will initially > have three disks with softraid in RAID5 mode. > > I've three questions regarding softraid: > > 1) I intend on using a single-core 1.8Ghz Atom processor I have lying > around. Would that limit my performance too much? I'll be using this > fileserver mostly for media (movies/series/music) and some ocassional > backups. Can anyone share what CPU they've used and their experience? (I'm > clarifying my intended usage for the fileserver since I think it's quite > relevant to say if the CPU is or isn't enough).
Wrong question, I think. More than processor is memory (caching) and disk interface (ahci rocks), network interface, etc. > 2) How do I add additional volumes to an already created softraid > volume? I intend on adding additional disks as necessary. Is it possible? Not in the way you are likely thinking. Besides, your Atom board probably has a rather finite amount of expandability. > 3) The man pages report RAID5 as experimental. I'm curious, why is > this so? Is it just not-very-thoroughly tested, or is there some > missing feature? I read on a 2010 presentation that rebuild was not > implemented yet, is this still so? That's really a question you will need to find out though experimentation before you implement (i.e., you MUST practice this recovery stuff before going into production), but yes, RAID5 rebuild is still not there, so I would NOT recommend going this route. However, a nice little RAID1 system to start, hopefully leaving you two SATA ports for the next generation/upgrade disks. Nick.
