Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 15:54:42 -0500 From: "Jim C. Nasby" <jim@nasby.net> To: Bennett Hui <bhui@mail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: RAID 5 with Vinum Message-ID: <39EA1992.62F6FCC0@nasby.net> References: <NDBBKCNFGLGFDJGFGEECKEOBCDAA.bhui@mail.com>
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I don't see a reply from Greg, so I'll try and fill his shoes a bit. Bennett Hui wrote: > > I'm thinking about setting up a RAID 5 system with Vinum using 4 IDE HDDs. > I've looked through the man pages on vinumvm.org, but I still have one > preliminary question: It's worth mentioning that you really don't want to create any plexes that address two drives that are on the same IDE controller. IDE can't handle concurrent requests, so you end up waiting for one drive to finish before you can even tell the next drive what to do. Either use 4 seperate IDE controllers, or SCSI. > when installing FreeBSD with the intention of setting up RAID 5 using Vinum > on 4 hard drives, do I install the whole OS on one hard drive and then use > Vinum to arrange the file system on the remaining 3 hard drives, or do I > install the OS on all 4 hard drives (assign space that fills up all 4 > drives) and use Vinum to work out the RAID 5 itself afterwards? You can install almost the entire OS under a vinum volume; the notable exception is /. You need / to get the kernel up and running, and you need the kernel to be able to talk to a vinum volume. This is something that Greg wants to change, but there's no ETA. > One other question about Vinum I have: > > If I have the FreeBSD OS on 2 hard drives without any RAID/Vinum setup and > then decide to add two more hard drives and setup RAID 5, is this something > that Vinum can easily do, or is it easier to reformat all 4 drives and start > from scratch? If Vinum can do this "on the fly," what Vinum commands/steps > would I use to do it? Vinum can't currently resize a RAID5 volume, but even if it could, newfs can't change the size of an existing filesystem, so you're still stuck with moving all your data and recreating that volume. Note that you do *not* need to 'format' the actual drives though; this kind of change can be handled entirely by vinum. > Thanks. > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Jim C. Nasby (aka Decibel!) /^\ jim@nasby.net /___\ Freelance lighting designer and database developer / | \ Member: Triangle Fraternity, Sports Car Club of America /___|___\ Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 Get paid to surf!! http://www.enteract.com/~nasby/alladvantage.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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