Markus W Kilbinger wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Im planning to build a huge file server. My idea was to put about 8
> big IDE or SATA disks (500 - 750 GB each) into a PC/i386 based system
> and create a big raid(4) on it (RAID level 5, I thought).
> 
> I guess I have to use ffs2 to create partitions larger than 1 (2?)
> tera bytes. Does this work sufficiently, yet?
> 
> Can raid(4) handle partitions of that size?
> 
> Which (actual) mainboards, SATA-Controller and NIC's are suitable for
> this task and supported well by NetBSD?
> 
> Any comments, hints and recommendations are welcome.
> 
> Markus.


I have a system like you desire. It has eight 400GB SATA drives 
configured as two RAID 5 arrays for exported storage. A single SCSI 
drive is used as the system disk.

The system is essentially this one:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/3U/6033/SYS-6033P-8R.cfm

but using a 3U SATA chassis rather than the SCSI chassis show. The SATA 
controllers are LSI MegaRAID 150-4 (the newer LSI controllers were not 
supported at the time of purchase) and the drives are WD Caviar RE2 
400GB SATA drives. The system disk is a Seagate Cheetah 36GB SCSI drive.

Disks are partitioned as follows:

nas$ mount
/dev/sd0a on / type ffs (local)
/dev/sd0f on /var type ffs (soft dependencies, local)
/dev/sd0e on /usr type ffs (soft dependencies, local)
/dev/sd0g on /home type ffs (soft dependencies, local)
/dev/sd0h on /usr/obj type ffs (noatime, soft dependencies, local)
/dev/sd0i on /usr/pkg type ffs (soft dependencies, local)
/dev/ld0a on /export1 type ffs (soft dependencies, NFS exported, local)
/dev/ld0e on /logArchive type ffs (soft dependencies, NFS exported, local)
/dev/ld0f on /unused type ffs (soft dependencies, local)
/dev/ld1a on /export2 type ffs (soft dependencies, NFS exported, local)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (local)
kernfs on /kern type kernfs (local)

The system has been operational for around 8 months without problems.

-- 
John R. Shannon, CISSP
john@johnrshannon.com
jshannon@dsci-usa.com
john.r.shannon@us.army.mil
shannonjr@NetBSD.org