Skip to main content

Further Adventures with Software RAID

By
I have now commissioned our new file server. The two disks reporting reallocated sectors have stabilised and there has been no change to the number for ten days. My research (a quote from the Seagate support forums) indicated that there are a lot (maybe even thousands) of spare sectors on the 1.5TB drives so I decided to go ahead and commission the new file server after adding a sixth disk (a Samsung 1.5TB) to take the space to 7TB. Using my own blog post to add and grow the raid worked fine after I fixed the "mdadm --grow" example to include the "-n 6" parameter. Without that the extra disk was kept as a spare disk !

There is one other thing to do - use "tunefs" to remove the reserved space that Linux automatically keeps on each disk. For a storage medium why keep 5% or more unused?

See http://www.walkernews.net/2007/02/28/tune2fs-increase-linux-free-disk-space/ for more details on how to do this and why you might want to.

I will wait a few weeks before reusing the old 1TB drives just in case.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Extended Attributes Are Inconsistent in Windows 8

By
I have upgraded my laptop to Windows 8 and all was fine for about three hours and then I started to get an error when trying to run any application that required Administrator privileges. Half an hour of Googling led me to this blog post   Case of the broken uac prompt This problem was caused by downloading themes. The final theme I had decided on included a new sound theme. Clearly at least one of the sounds did not play (the one for the UAC prompt!). Changing the sound theme (right click on desktop, choose "personalisation") to Windows Default sorted out the problem. Doing a clean install would also have fixed it but that would have been a drastic solution and as soon as I installed a new theme it may have happened again.
30 comments
Read more

Beware vnc and upnp

By
My new linux box got hacked yesterday. I was careless. My ADSL router has upnp support and it is turned on by default. I enabled "Remote Desktop" in Linux - which is a version of vnc - and decided not to set a password as it would not be accessible from outside the local network. That was my first mistake. Last night I noticed a second connection to the linux box. Someone was using the browser and had connected to Western Union and was trying to install the flash plugin. They had not got very far as Fedora 14 does not install Flash on a 64bit system as it is still in beta so the install is not straightforward. I was able to disconnect this errant person before they got any further and I then disconnected the ADSL line from the modem to prevent another attempt and proceeded to diagnose what had happened. I checked the preferences for VNC and noticed the automatically configure the network check box had been selected and that it was reporting an external address could be ...
3 comments
Read more

Computer Fun (warning technical content)

By
I had to build a new computer when the motherboard in my personal computer developed a few faults and is being replaced. So I have been trying out Windows Vista. I must admit to being underwhelmed. Different versions of the Video drivers have caused lockups at inconvenient moments (is there a convenient moment ?), the Aero effects are nice but I turned them off as every time you run a non-compliant (with Aero) program the display flicks off and on (annoying!!), the explorer directory window will not show the total size of the files on the status bar unless you select all the files and the details view has had all the items changed and about 500 extra items added. Duration is now called Length, Dimensions is now two items and so on. Installation is improved over XP but it really depends on your hardware. I could not get all the hardware supported for an ASUS A8S-X motherboard until I installed XP first and upgraded to Vista. Trying to install XP drivers for the motherboard and othe...
6 comments
Read more