Over time I've used a few different scenarios and found all of them to work just fine. We've used the Dell CERC RAID controllers (Adaptec), and the regular branded Adaptec RAID controllers. I normally create a giant RAID 5 array out of all of my disks then just create a /boot, /, and swap partition. I do make sure I have the swap partition set to at least 2048M because files that are in and out of the tmp directory or queue directories seem to work better if you have a bigger swap.
If you're wondering why I didn't manually create each individual partition, it's because of future space requirements. I might sacrifice a tiny bit of performance by breaking up the root directories into partitions, but I would rather do that than run out of disk space on one partition and have to blow away my installation completely just to resize one partition. If you're just looking for the reliability of RAID and not necessarily the performance increase of it, I'd make sure you stick to a hardware RAID 1 setup. If you have a little extra cash and room in your server, it's always better to have a RAID 5 over a RAID 1 and get some SATAII drives. I've ran into several circumstances where a RAID 1 array has failed and I still get corrupt data. I've never ran into that with a RAID 5 setup. For performance and reliability, I'd go either with the Adaptec 2251800-R or the Adaptec 2220300-R cards. The storage manager is extremely easy to work with and it even does alerting if you have it setup correctly. Ryan -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Koch [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 2:32 PM To: toaster@shupp.org Subject: RE: [toaster] toaster RAID setup Hi Ryan: How do you have the file systems setup on the SATA RAID machine. Do you have the entire toaster on the RAID 5 array? (i.e. the qmail queue as well as the /home/vpopmail/domain directories). Which SATA RAID card are you using and do you have write caching enabled. In our case we're not really looking for a speed increase - mainly just reliability - so we though RAID 1 mirroring would help. At 01:26 PM 9/6/2007, you wrote: >I've run a SATA setup in one location for about 3 years now and a SAS setup >for about a year now. We've run RAID 5 on both setups and the servers have >over 1000 domains each. I've never seen any performance hits on the systems >at all. It seems like the only thing that helps performance of either of the >systems were the type of CPU's I had. The newer machine with 2 x dual core >XEON CPU's seems to process anything you throw at it with no issues at all. >The entire toaster install only took 15 minutes on that machine. > >Ryan > >-----Original Message----- >From: Jeff Koch [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 11:49 AM >To: toaster@shupp.org >Subject: [toaster] toaster RAID setup > > > >Has anyone successfully setup Bill's toaster with SATA RAID? A year or two >ago we setup a toaster with a two drive 3ware IDE RAID mirroring setup and >the performance was awful. Maybe it was because we didn't have write >caching enabled on the RAID controller or should have tweaked the kernel >settings. > >I looked at Bill's proposed setup for an ISP but we're just trying to do >this for a single server setup. The only solution we've been able to come >up with in the past is to have a single small drive for booting, /var/qmail >and /var/logs and run SATA RAID for /home/vpopmail and everything else. But >we'd really like to have RAID running for the qmail queue since that's what >beats the hell out of a hard disk. > >Any recommendations or experiences anyone? > > > >Best Regards, > >Jeff Koch Best Regards, Jeff Koch, Intersessions
