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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
- Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!taco!cfd.mae.ncsu.edu!garvin
- From: garvin@cfd.mae.ncsu.edu (Michael Garvin)
- Subject: Formatting 2 gigabyte disks (also, striping questions)
- Message-ID: <1992Jul22.213912.13138@ncsu.edu>
- Sender: news@ncsu.edu (USENET News System)
- Organization: North Carolina State University
- Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 21:39:12 GMT
- Lines: 56
-
- I have what are probably a few senseless questions. Our setup is a
- Power Series 4D/440 with a Jaguar differential SCSI controller. Connected to
- each channel is a third-party drive tray containing four Micropolis 1548 disks
- (2,000 MB/unit unformatted capacity, 1,748 MB/unit formatted) and a single
- ended SCSI to differential SCSI converter. After formatting and partitioning
- the disks I notice a few curious things. First, fx reports, correctly I
- believe, the drive geometry:
-
- ----- current drive geometry-----
- Tracks/zone = 15 Sect/track = 131
- Alt sect/zone = 8 Interleave = 1 Cylinders = 2112
- Alt track/volume = 45 Cylinder skew = 43 Heads = 15
- Alt track/zone = 0 Track skew = 13 Data bytes/sec = 512
-
- showing 2,112 cylinders which is close to what the Micropolis manual states
- (2,099 unformatted, 2089 formatted). However, the partition table (partition
- ten in particular) tell a different story:
-
- ----- partitions-----
- part type cyls blocks Megabytes (base+size)
- 0: efs 3 + 16 5871 + 31312 3 + 15
- 1: rawdata 19 + 41 37183 + 80237 18 + 39
- 6: efs 60 + 1651 117420 + 3231007 57 + 1578
- 7: lvol 3 + 1708 5871 + 3342556 3 + 1632
- 8: volhdr 0 + 3 0 + 5871 0 + 3
- 10: entire 0 + 1711 0 + 3348427 0 + 1635
-
- Is this discrepancy (2,089 vs 1711 cylinders) a possible bug in fx? What leads
- me to think this is that 1,711 works out close to 1.65 gigabytes, the size of
- the largest drive SGI is supporting. I've tried altering that parameter, but
- fx refuses to let me do so.
-
- Secondly, I was wondering if someone would critique my striping scheme.
- Here's my /etc/lvtab file:
-
- -=-=-=-=-
- #
- # Logical volumes on Falcon drive trays (each with four two-gigabyte drives).
- #
- lv0:First 8 Gigabyte Striped Logical Volume:stripes=4:devs=/dev/dsk/jag0d2s7, \/dev/dsk/jag0d3s7, /dev/dsk/jag0d10s7, /dev/dsk/jag0d11s7
-
- lv1:Second 8 Gigabyte Striped Logical Volume:stripes=4:devs=/dev/dsk/jag0d4s7, \
- /dev/dsk/jag0d5s7, /dev/dsk/jag0d12s7, /dev/dsk/jag0d13s7
- -=-=-=-=-
-
- As I understand it this should provide maximum performance by striping across
- each of the four two-gigabyte drive (an eight gigabyte partition), with two
- drives in each logical volume being on a controller channel. Comments?
-
- Thanks in advance for any aid rendered.
-
- --
- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
- Michael Garvin [System Manager] garvin@mmrc.ncsu.edu
- Mars Mission Research Center, NCSU (919) 515-5250
- "We're not hitch-hiking any more, we're _riding_!" - Ren and Stimpy
-