On Tuesday 27 January 2009, Morten Torstensen wrote:
John Doe wrote:
I just received a new server (HP DL180G5) with 12x 1TB HDs and I bumped into fdisks 2TB limits...
I would create two raid logical volumes, one for centos (say, 20GB to 100GB) and one with the rest of the space. Install centos and normal MBR on /dev/sda and then use lvm on the /dev/sdb directly with no partition table needed.
Smartarray controllers user cciss.ko which is one of the few block I/O thingys that doesn't use the linux scsi layer. Devices will be /dev/cciss/c0d0, c0d1, ...
I would also strongly consider having two disks mirrored for the system in one lvm vg and the rest in another, but with 1TB disks it is kind of wasted space. Tho with 12 disks you can have 2 disks for RAID1, then 8+P+1 in RAID5.
Smartarray controllers don't work like "normal" raid. You can have the first part of all your 12 drives be a logical raid1+0 and then the rest be a raid6. In this way you won't "waste" two drive-slots for OS.
/Peter