early corax

Tested on my AMD Phenom X4 955

Java 6 (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM; 17.1-b03 mixed mode)

Java 7 (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM; 21.0-b17 mixed mode)

Result: 4.9% average performance gain

Finally got a real RAID Controller, its an LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS 9240-4i Kit for 240€ incl. shipment. Again I had to move ~2TB of data to temporary storage and after properly setting up the logical drive move it all back again.

The new setup involved:
(1) 4x SATA 2TB Harddisks
(2) Single logical volume with RAID 5
(3) Transition from MTB to GPT partition table

Difficulties:
(1) Needed a Windows installation to update controller firmware
(2) Had to swap server’s with HTPC’s mainboard because the controller didn’t work
(3) We’ve been offline for 2 days

The resulting benefits:
(1) 6TB redundant Storage
(2) Powersavings due to automatic Drive Spin Down

Didn’t quite expect storage needs to become that extensive so soon. 2 Terabyte should at least suffice for some years. But last week I faced free storage capacity on the corax server nearing zero.

So I bought another pair of 2 TB disks (€70 each) and finally extended the capacities to 4TB (RAID 1). The whole process took 2 nights.

The LVM tricks I used are shown here: wiki

P.S.: Next time I’ll probably get myself a real raid-controller and migrate to 6TB RAID 5.