From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Mar 16 10:21: 6 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1B1BA37B401 for ; Sun, 16 Mar 2003 10:21:05 -0800 (PST) Received: from lv.raad.tartu.ee (lv.raad.tartu.ee [194.126.106.110]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3108C43F85 for ; Sun, 16 Mar 2003 10:21:02 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from toomas.aas@raad.tartu.ee) Received: Message by Barricade lv.raad.tartu.ee with ESMTP id h2GIKvU24279; Sun, 16 Mar 2003 20:20:57 +0200 Message-Id: <200303161820.h2GIKvU24279@lv.raad.tartu.ee> Received: from INFO/SpoolDir by raad.tartu.ee (Mercury 1.48); 16 Mar 03 20:20:40 +0200 Received: from SpoolDir by INFO (Mercury 1.48); 16 Mar 03 20:20:21 +0200 From: "Toomas Aas" Organization: Tartu City Government To: Malcolm Kay , questions@freebsd.org Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 20:20:19 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: vinum based system In-reply-to: <200303151623.03287.Malcolm.Kay@internode.on.net> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi! > Having no experience with vinum or software RAID systems a number of > questions come to mind: > > 1) All the examples appear to use scsi drives; but I assume EIDE are also > usable? IDE seems to be pretty good these days and much cheaper than scsi. Yes, IDE drives can be used with Vinum. As to the price/quality ratio, that's up to you to decide. I myself still prefer SCSI for servers. I'd use SCSI, if the server needs to be, as you say, "fairly reliable with respect to hardware failure - particularly disk drives". > 2)To what extent can the system be fully mirrored? Without RAID hardware it > seems to me that a conventional disk partition outside the mirrored volume is > probably necessary for mounting / ; is this true? Yes. > 3)If the regular partition is necessary can this be taken as a modest slice > from one of the disks whose major part is devoted to the mirror volume, > and perhaps the corresponding slice on the other used for swap? Yes. That's (almost) exactly what I'm doing - the "corresponding slice on the other disk" is used for swap and /var/tmp. -- Toomas Aas | toomas.aas@raad.tartu.ee | http://www.raad.tartu.ee/~toomas/ * Be sure to use DEVICE=EXXON to screw up your environment. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message