From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed May 11 18:54:05 2005 Return-Path: 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 7863016A4CE for ; Wed, 11 May 2005 18:54:05 +0000 (GMT) Received: from blackwater.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.135]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AF37A43D5E for ; Wed, 11 May 2005 18:54:03 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: from blackwater.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.135]) by blackwater.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B964D9A285; Thu, 12 May 2005 01:10:22 +0930 (CST) Received: by blackwater.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id E54944D2FA; Wed, 11 May 2005 11:40:20 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 10:40:20 -0500 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey To: Tony Shadwick Message-ID: <20050511154020.GC12914@eucla.lemis.com> References: <20050510155942.V34838@mail.goinet.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20050510155942.V34838@mail.goinet.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 9A1B 8202 BCCE B846 F92F 09AC 22E6 F290 507A 4223 cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hardware RAID 5 - Need vinum? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 18:54:05 -0000 On Tuesday, 10 May 2005 at 16:05:50 -0500, Tony Shadwick wrote: > I've worked with RAID5 in FreeBSD in the past, with either vinum or a > hardware raid solution. Never had any problems either way. > > I'm now building a server for myself at home, and I'm creating a large > volume to store video. I have purchased 3 200GB EIDE hard drives, and a 6 > channel Promise SX6000 ATA RAID controller. > > I know how to set up a RAID5 set, and create a mountpoint (say > /media/video). > > What my concern is when I start to fill up the ~400GB of space I'm giving > myself with this set. I would like to simply insert another 200GB drive > and expand the array, allowing the hardware raid to do the work. > > The problem I see with this is that yes, the /dev/(raid driver name)0 will > now be that much larger, however the original partition size and the > subsequent slices will still be the original size. Do I need to (and is > there a way?) to utilize vinum and still allow the hardware raid > controller to do the raid5 gruntwork and still have the ability to > arbitrarily grow the volume as needed? The only other solution I see is > to use vinum to software-raid the set of drives, leaving it as a glorified > ATA controller card, and the cpu/ram of the card unitilized and burden the > system CPU and RAM with the task. What you need here is not Vinum (which would replace the hardware RAID array), but growfs. You'd need that with Vinum as well. There have been issues with growfs in the past; last time I looked it hadn't been updated to handle UFS 2. If you don't need the UFS 2 functionality, you might be better off using UFS 1 if you intend to grow the file system. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. If you don't, I may ignore the reply or reply to the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers