Solaris 2.6 Trans metadevice performance

[spamly]

I have a few older servers which aren't holding up very well. I've had three hardware crashes in as many weeks. Moving to different hardware isn't an option. When one of these servers crashes, it takes 3 or 4 hours to run a filesystem check (fsck).

I'm using Solaris 2.6, so standard filesystem logging isn't an option and the particular application doesn't support any newer OS. I was looking into trans metadevices to help me out instead.

Does anyone have any experience with these?
Do they hamper or improver performance?
Is there a formula for figuring out the size of this device? (My filesystems are ~70 GB with 3.5 million files)
Will fsck's run lightning fast like jfs or jfs2 filesystems?

 

[daFranze]

I don't have much experience with the transdevices, just a few things I remember from the training and some notes I wrote down:

performance: not a realy big deal, I guess it's less than 5% overhead
Size: min 1MB max 1GB, Sun recommends 64MB (not depending on the size of the UFS!?), Sun suggests to mirror this transdevice! This Transdevice can be used by more than one UFS

BTW: Sun says "we are compatible to older SunOS releases", so I guess your application would work on SunOS 5.7 as well, but the support of your application will go up walls! ;-)

Best Regards, Franz
--
Solaris System Manager from Munich, Germany
I used to work for Sun Microsystems Support (EMEA) for 5 years