From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Dec 2 09:56:47 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 51810106564A for ; Tue, 2 Dec 2008 09:56:47 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from Pieter.Donche@ua.ac.be) Received: from hmacs.cmi.ua.ac.be (hmacs.cmi.ua.ac.be [143.129.75.10]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E52918FC08 for ; Tue, 2 Dec 2008 09:56:46 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from Pieter.Donche@ua.ac.be) Received: from hmacs.cmi.ua.ac.be (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hmacs.cmi.ua.ac.be (8.13.8+Sun/8.13.8) with ESMTP id mB29uji0004086 for ; Tue, 2 Dec 2008 10:56:45 +0100 (CET) Received: from localhost (pdon@localhost) by hmacs.cmi.ua.ac.be (8.13.8+Sun/8.13.8/Submit) with ESMTP id mB29uiQT004083 for ; Tue, 2 Dec 2008 10:56:45 +0100 (CET) X-Authentication-Warning: hmacs.cmi.ua.ac.be: pdon owned process doing -bs Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2008 10:56:44 +0100 (CET) From: Pieter Donche X-X-Sender: pdon@hmacs.cmi.ua.ac.be To: "mail.list freebsd-questions" Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Subject: (no subject) X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: Pieter Donche List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:56:47 -0000 If one has a system with 7 500Gb SATA disks in a hardware RAID6 (Areca Raid Controller), then (according to mail J.Chadwick 7 Nov 2008) they will show up as da (following naming convention for scsi disks although they are not). RAID6 will allow about 2,5 Tb for the 'user' (roughly 1 Tb will be consumed by the parity information of RAID6). How will this 2,5 Tb space present itself at the time of initial install of FreeBSD? Will this be a single 'disk' ad0 ? .. correct or not (then what)? If FreeBSD is to put on the system as only operating system (Fdisk: "A = Use Entire disk"), then will the BSD-partitions will show up as ad0a (/), ad0b (swap), ad0d (/var) etc... correct or not (then what)? Page 427 of the FreeBSD handbook states that due to the use of 32-bit integers to store the number of sectors is limited to 2^32 -1 sectors/disk = 2 TB. A layout could be a / 1Gb, b swap, d /root 20 Gb, (a /root partition is from an example of someone who claims that at boot FreeBSD checks the partions in background except for the / partition, by keeping / as small as possible, the time to boot can be mimimized .. correct? but will /root ever be something big ??) e /tmp 20 Gb, f /var 20 Gb, g /usr 20 Gb this leaves 2420 Gb which is more than 2 Tb, so you can't put all that in 1 filesystem h /home, you will need to split that in 2 BSD-paritions, but since you can't have more that 8 BSD-partitions (highest BSD-partition letter is h), you need to give up at least one of d, e, f, g. ... correct or not (then what)? What is the best scheme of BSD-partitioning in this case?