From owner-freebsd-hackers Sat Apr 1 06:14:48 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id GAA12193 for hackers-outgoing; Sat, 1 Apr 1995 06:14:48 -0800 Received: from crh.cl.msu.edu (crh.cl.msu.edu [35.8.1.24]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with SMTP id GAA12187 for ; Sat, 1 Apr 1995 06:14:46 -0800 Message-Id: <199504011414.GAA12187@freefall.cdrom.com> Received: by crh.cl.msu.edu (1.38.193.4/16.2) id AA16038; Sat, 1 Apr 1995 09:14:31 -0500 Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 09:14:31 -0500 From: Charles Henrich To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: large filesystems/multiple disks X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #10 (NOV) Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk The main gain is just-in-time meeting of storage requirements on huge databases that grow incrementally slow. The next most [snip] is largely a useless application. So while it is a cool feature, it has limited practical utility. Actually we dont use it nearly as offen to add just-in-time storage requirements, but to have a single fileserver partition, or news partition or whatever, which makes management of such dynamic data (before spanning capabilities are filesystems always had wildly changing utilization characteristics) a hell of a lot easier, and more sane. Since everything we do 'round here is backed up nightly, it isnt a problem if a disk fails. Actually, on our most critical servers we also do mirroring of the data to ensure realtime backups are available. (Any plans for mirroring? :) -Crh -- Charles Henrich Michigan State University henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu http://rs560.msu.edu/~henrich/