You don't mention what size drives they are (9/18/36GB). As a rule, however, I
would suggest that you are correct in thinking you would be better off combining
disks to make a single volume. You can use qtrees to segragate data (& give
more control if some is NFS & some CIFS, for example).
I believe that your 'heavy reads & writes' will benefit from the larger raid
group.
You would obviously need to destroy vol1 before adding disks to vol0.
Just one minor point - I presume you do have a spare disk as well - if not, &
you have a disk fail, the filer will squawk at hourly intervals complaining,
then if you don't add a drive, shutdown after 24 hours (options raid.timeout
defaults to 24 [hours] to configure this) on the basis that you don't want to
run degraded for any significant time.
Cheers
Mike
UK SE
-----Original Message-----
From: Pesce, Nicholas (FUSA) [mailto:Nicholaspesce@firstusa.com]
Sent: 11 September 2000 21:30
To: 'toasters(a)mathworks.com'
Subject: 2 volumes or 1
Gentlemen,
I need your opinion on a creation I am about to unleash on our
unsuspecting production site where I work.
I currently have a 740 filer with 2 shelves and 7 disks.
3 disks are in the first shelf and configured for volume 0 root volume
4 disks are inthe second shelf and configured for volume 1
Now, since I didn't put this box together. I was wondering if it is better
to make all of these disks one volume. There are heavy reads and writes to
the volume1, but I don't know if having a heavily used volume combined with
root functions will kill my performance. Besides this will make a larger
volume for more distributed writes (8 total disks versus 4). Also I will be
saving 1 disk of data space because I won't need the second parity disk.
Addition information is that they are fibre channel shelves (of course).
And that the data is not important (washed away daily).
Assuming that the root volume functions do not critically affect my box (and
I don't believe that they do, as most of it is running from memory) I
believe my choice is correct.
Just wondering if you guys agree with this hypothesis or not.
Nicholas Pesce
Internet Production Services
Phone: 847 488-6384
Pager: 888 785 3455
Fax: 847 488 3434