Tag: zfs

  • State of the storage benchmark

    Bryan Cantrill over at Sun Fishworks wrote an Excellent Blog Post on why SPECsfs sucks. Go read it. Seriously. You need to.  Then start to wonder about all the other “benchmarks” SPEC publishes.  The blog post there explains WHY you can’t get affordable storage from big vendors, and why all of it’s performance is so crappy […]

  • ZFS In Action

    Well we’ve now had a few months of full production ZFS usage. We’ve had our first drive failure which exposed the oddities of drive failures under ZFS. It does work REALLY hard to cover them up, so much so that it never really quite gave up on the dead drive until I ran zpool offline […]

  • New server coming!

    Well, the box running dotblag.com, while plenty serviceable, is showing it’s age.  I’ve ordered a pretty large machine (just short of $3000 in total parts) and the bits are on their way, woohoo!  I’ll be setting it up and burning it in over the next month or two.  Once it’s ready dotblag will be moving […]

  • Goodbye Areca, Hello LSI

    While it’s not clear exactly who-is-causing what, what is clear is the areca driver tries to de-reference a NULL pointer, this is either because the adapter screws up, or the driver screws up somewhere. The result is a Solaris kernel fault, pointing at the arcmsr driver, and apparently an adapter lockup.  It’s not 100% clear […]

  • RAID, no, not the insecticide, though there is a bug here.

    Areca ARC-1280 (and ARC-1280ML’s, same product, different connector) have 24 SATA ports.  But only support 16 drives in JBOD mode….or in any mode really, 16 drives exposed to the host is maximum.  The controller deadlocks during POST/INIT if you have 17+ drives when it’s set to JBOD mode.  So you can have 12 LUNs 2 […]