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@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