Configuring HP-UX For Peripherals

138 Chapter5

Conﬁguring Disk Drives, Disk Arrays, and CD-ROM Drives

Planning to Conﬁgure a Disk Drive

Review the material discussed in this chapter for each kind of disk drive.

Identify the device driver(s) that must be present in the kernel for the

interface and disk device you are installing. You will ﬁnd the device

drivers listed in “Selecting Device Drivers for a Disk Device and

Interface”.

Once you have planned your disk conﬁguration, proceed to the section,

“Conﬁguring HP-UX for a New Disk Device”.

Performance

Overall system performance depends partly on how your disks are

arranged on your system.

To optimize performance, consider the distribution of data on your disks.

If possible, use several smaller disks instead of a single larger-capacity

disk for all disk needs. Conﬁgure a mid-sized disk (for example, 677MB

or 1GB) for / and /usr ﬁle systems and for any software applications.

Use separate disks for user ﬁles, database ﬁles, and anything else that

grows. This allows the system to perform more efﬁciently by distributing

I/O across spindles and shortens the time for ﬁle-system integrity check.

Do not exceed HP-recommended guidelines for maximum number of

disks or disk arrays per interface card. Note too that the kind of disk

access (random vs. sequential), CPU overhead and total system capacity,

cabling distance, disk-array conﬁguration, and block size all affect

performance.

Consult your HP sales representative for information on performance

expectations, based on your predominant system I/O workload and disk

characteristics.

Considerations for Conﬁguring a Disk Array

You must use SAM to conﬁgure and manage the HP A3231A and A3232A

disk arrays. The conﬁguration utilities for these devices are unavailable

using a command-line interface.

If you are conﬁguring any other disk arrays, besure that you have loaded

onto your system the C2400-UTIL ﬁleset containing the disk array