[rescue] Re: 2x4.3 or 9gb?

[Robert Novak]

On Sat, 13 Oct 2001, Mike Dombrowski wrote:

> My new U30 is coming soon and I've got two 4.3gb 700rpm drives 
> and one 9gb 10k drive. I'm going to be doing a new install of Solaris 
> 8 and I'm wondering what is better, two 4.3s striped or the 10k 
> drive? 

I don't know that you'll see much benefit either way most of the time,
unless you do some serious tweaking after the install.

> I don't need much in the way of storage, 2gb is enough so it comes
> down to whichever drive is faster. If the 2x 4.3 would be faster how
> do you set this up? I've not seen any options during install for this.

Assuming you don't have the spare cash around to license Veritas volume
manager, Solstice Disksuite is your primary venue under Solaris. You might
consider doing a base install into a 1GB slice and then install SDS from
http://www.sun.com/solaris/ds/ds-disksuite/index.html and mirror the rest
of each disk. 

My inclination, given two 4gb disks and a "requirement" to mirror, would
be: 

Format each disk roughly as such:

	1024MB	/			c0t0d0s0	c0t1d0s0
	512MB	swap			c0t0d0s1	c0t1d0s1
	2560MB	unassigned		c0t0d0s6	c0t1d0s6

Install Solaris on c0t0d0s0, using c0t[01]d0s1 as swap. Do a developer
install probably... full/full+oem may exceed 1GB.

After rebooting, install SDS and create a mirror with c0t[01]d0s6, newfs
it, and mount it. Then either move part of your root filesystem over (/usr
maybe) or use it as another mount point for stuff you want more
performance for. 

Finally, write yourself a little script that will periodically mount
c0t1d0s0 and ufsdump->ufsrestore c0t0d0s0 to it and umount it again. Cold
spare mirroring for your root partition. :) If your primary root gets
corrupted or botched, you can 'boot disk1:a' from the ok prompt and get
back in. Might have your script change c0t0d0s0 in the copied vfstab to
c0t1d0s0 so it won't get confused.

There is a way to add an existing partition to a new mirror, but you'd
have to go read the disksuite manual (or wait for someone with a better
memory than mine to come along) to see how to do this. In that case, you
could install /usr on c0t0d0s6 and then just add it to a mirror device. 

I just set up a webserver on an Ultra 2 with a pair of 4gb disks, and I
went lazy. 3.5gb s0, .5gb s1, the s1 were both swap. t0s0 is /, t1s0 is
/export for my web stuff. And at some point soon I'll set it up to sdist
into a location on my desktop U2 with a 73gb disk in it. One less
networker client to use up that way :)

--Rob

-- 
Robert Novak, Indyramp Consulting * rnovak at indyramp.com * indyramp.com/~rnovak
        "And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
           Maybe this year will be better than the last...." -- counting crows