Trials and tribulations of a new Admin.

Couldn't agree more!

We only have 17 Enterprise CALs though so most people are using them. Working on that...
 
Next stage of moving the data off the original main server. 220GB at a whopping 80-140Mbps. Half a million files. Estimated 6 hours to do it.

This will make about 600GB moved off, might finally be able to defrag the thing.

edit: Forgot to use multi thread, now running at closer to 500Mbps.
 
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So about 750GB free, something like 42% of the drive. Defraggler still can't get it below 18% fragmented so it's now defragging the empty space.

Ugh.
 
Defragging is pretty risky, and in particular with a 3rd party tool. I most definitely wouldn't. What OS is this server running?
 
What's the array on? What connectivity? How are you measuring throughput? What's the I/O and what is the total I/O you should be getting?
 
P410i

It's just the built in tool in defraggler - the 100GB OS partition gives over 6MB/Sec but the data partition almost scrapes 2MB/Sec.
 
nutcase_1uk said:
2008 R2. 8 disk R5 array getting a massive 2MB/Sec random read off of it. It's a disaster :(
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I was under the impression that thanks to UBER and high rebuild times RAID 5 et al were no longer worth it these days for smaller capacities. Just use mirrored drives, stripe across mirrors if necessary, and have done. In your case, with under 2 TB, you could just get a pair of high capacity drives and mirror them.
 
It's not the overall array size that is the issue with R5, it's the individual disk size. The rule of thumb to not go above is 1TB. These are 300GB units.

And it's URE not UBER ;)

This and the one other remainig physical server will get new disks and configured in R10 when they (eventually) get re-purposed. Which isn't yet unfortunately.
 
No, I meant UBER - Unrecoverable Bit Error Rate.

And with 8x 300GB drives in RAID 5 you have 2.1 TB space, so just mirror a pair of 4 TB drives. KISS. How long have you spent trying to resolve this issue? How much has that cost your employer? You can even get 4 TB SSDs these days; the Samsung SSDs are around £1200, so for £2500 you could buy a pair, resolve the issue, and gain a massive performance increase.
 
Quartz said:
No, I meant UBER - Unrecoverable Bit Error Rate.

And with 8x 300GB drives in RAID 5 you have 2.1 TB space, so just mirror a pair of 4 TB drives. KISS. How long have you spent trying to resolve this issue? How much has that cost your employer? You can even get 4 TB SSDs these days; the Samsung SSDs are around £1200, so for £2500 you could buy a pair, resolve the issue, and gain a massive performance increase.
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So Non-recoverable read errors per bits read? Not seen it referred to as UBER before. But same as hitting an URE.

Actual time spent on it? A couple of hours at the very most. Time the software has spent running? Couple of hundred hours probably. Amazed a disk hasn't coughed to be honest. It's 3 steps forward and 1 step back as I'm getting it down to a couple of hundred fragmented files then over the course of the working day (~05:00-~22:00) it goes back up to tens of thousands. Being that it was over half a million originally progress has been made.

Think I'd get rather bizarre looks if I tried to get the OK to spend ~£2100 on consumer drives for a server that don't have the right firmware for the server's inbuilt management.
 
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Why are you having to work with a complete sack of crap for your hardware? Surely it's a better use of your time and the time of everybody that works at your company to invest in new stuff that's more suitable for the workload?
 
A few things, random read/write on any traditional disk array will be that slow, sequential throughput could be fine. You can easily get 1-2MB/s 100% random but still several hundred MB/s sequential r/w.

Defraggler is pretty terrible from what I've seen of it. Turn on scheduled defrag in windows for once a week and worry less about the stats, files will fragment.
 
Caged said:
Why are you having to work with a complete sack of crap for your hardware? Surely it's a better use of your time and the time of everybody that works at your company to invest in new stuff that's more suitable for the workload?
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5 years ago the servers were all dumped in a pile on a desk for the world to see. It's taken a lot of persuasion to get a room built, a rack, aircon and so on. The company was a very small one that expanded fast. IT was a necessary evil that they hadn't realised was actually central to its operation. This mentality is changing, and now I've gone from occasional poking to pretty much in charge of IT it's changing fast. But in the last 24 months, we've spent more on IT than any other part of the company has spent. I've had to be gentle with expenditure :D I've personally spent about £25k - split between new PC to replace XP ones, a whole new backup regime and a new host. We got audited by microsoft and with misunderstanding how things work (not by me, not that I understand their licencing!) we had quite a large bill - number of activations does not mean you can use it that many times at once :rolleyes:

When I took it on I said if you give me £100k I'd built a whole new system that does what they need to do. Give me less and it will be a slow process with hiccups on the way. That's what they're getting. I'm enjoying the challenge, but some things do my head in.
 
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