stress testing insane file server

Aurisor · Guru Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 361 Location: Boston MA

Hey guys,

I just built an INSANE file server at work....3TB of storage in a raid 5 with hot spare. I went with a hardware raid...the 3ware 9500S-8 Of course, I've got Gentoo on it (same as all of our other machines here =). The whole machine only cost 4 grand and I built it out of off-the-shelf components.

Anyways, just two things:

First of all, if you ever happen to need to format a multi-terabyte drive, make sure you use parted instead of fdisk, as fdisk has a size ceiling. Just thought I'd pass that around because it left me scratching my head for a while.

Second, does anyone have any reccomendations for how to stress test the thing before we put it into service? Even though we have two spare drives, I'd feel safer copying every piece of data the company's produced in the last three years onto it if I ran some tests first =)

Thanks!

eelke · Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 8:34 pm Post subject:

Write a script that copies some files to the server and then compares them with the original. This will test both reading and writing. Then run multiple instances of the script (preferable from multiple clients) so the server has to both read and write. While it is doing this make one of the active drives fail (pull it out) and see if it does what it should do (rebuild it on the hot spare).

d_adams · Apprentice Joined: 20 Oct 2003 Posts: 223

If there isn't anything on the drives, you could always run shred on it. I did that on a usb drive that was giving me some problems. As I recall, it writes data to every sector of the drive, sequentially for 25 or 26 passes. I think the DOD standard is only 7 passes to wipe data from hard drives. That should give your machine plenty of stress on disk access. Check the man page on shred for more info.
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Aurisor · Guru Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 361 Location: Boston MA

Well, thank you both for your interesting replies. Ultimately I decided to go with shred and a full fsck. I also tested the system's ability to hot-swap and rebuild on the fly, which seemed quite satisfactory.

Thanks again guys!

d_adams · Apprentice Joined: 20 Oct 2003 Posts: 223

Not a problem, glad I had an idea that worked for you.
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