I have a backup server running on Centos 5.3 it has 1 TB hdd and RAID 5
setup. This is used as a NFS backup server. But the file system in the server
is becoming read only very frequently due to the increased write operations.


Every time, I have to run FSCK to bring the server back on line. This will
take more than eight hours. Can anyone suggest a better file system that can
be used for backup solutions. Also, is there any way to optimize my ext3 file
system to handle more write operations? The read operations in the server are
very rare as we do not do data restore frequently.

Please let me know your suggestions.


Thanx.

The ext3 is fine for this.

You can try this: elvtune -r 1024 -w 2048 /dev/sda
Tune the Elevator Algorithm in Linux Kernel for Disk I/O.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=N...esult&resnum=3

And take a look the journaling mode options for fine tuning.

But mainly it depends on the disks.
Software Raid-10 with SCSI/SAS the best one, I know that this is horrible expensive vs. SATA.

But definitely raid-10/SATA with low latency time HDDs(8.5, 8.3ms) will get you much better write performance then just one disk.

Laz

Thanx for your reply. I cannot find the command elvtune in the server. We need to install it separately? Also whether the command elvtune -r 1024 -w 2048 /dev/sda cause any problem to the existing data in the drive? Can you please tell me what exactly the command does?

Thanx in advance.

Should be /sbin/elvtune. See, e.g., http://www.redhat.com/support/wpaper...t3/tuning.html.

The command was not in /sbin. I think it is still the beta version. http://ftp.fr.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/

I will try this command and will let you know my experience. Meanwhile, anyone tried the ext4 file system? I think using ext4 will be better option.

Can you elaborate that? It's the first time I've heard of the concept of a file system "becoming read only due to increased write operations"? How does this work?

If you don't like the time ext3 takes to fsck, you can try reiserfs, it has much faster fsck. I prefer it over ext3, also for better performance*.

R.

*) subjectively measured, please don't flame me

We have a backup server. It is configured as a NFS backup server. Backup from a lot of other servers are copied into this server at different timings. May be due to this, our file system in the backup server is becoming read only very frequently. Since it is a big disk, fsck is taking too much time to complete.

Can you please explain me on how to do this reiserfs, when a filesystem is read only?