From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jul 23 17:16:21 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from allegro.lemis.com (allegro.lemis.com [192.109.197.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 62F61156E9 for ; Fri, 23 Jul 1999 17:16:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by allegro.lemis.com (8.9.1/8.9.0) with ESMTP id JAA06609; Sat, 24 Jul 1999 09:44:32 +0930 (CST) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id JAA42146; Sat, 24 Jul 1999 09:44:30 +0930 (CST) Date: Sat, 24 Jul 1999 09:44:30 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Roy Bettle Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Vinum/RAID questions. Message-ID: <19990724094430.G84734@freebie.lemis.com> References: <3798AA84.87CAABC6@criterion-group.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.4i In-Reply-To: <3798AA84.87CAABC6@criterion-group.com>; from Roy Bettle on Fri, Jul 23, 1999 at 10:46:45AM -0700 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Friday, 23 July 1999 at 10:46:45 -0700, Roy Bettle wrote: > Good morning all! Two quick vinum/RAID questions: > > Question #1) Is it possible to create a boot/install floppy that loads > vinum? I have 2, 1.2 GB EIDE drives and would like to have them seen as > one for the install if this is possible. No, that's not possible yet, but it will be Real Soon Now. > We are intending to us the DPT PM3334UW/3 - > http://www.dpt.com/products/pm3334uw.html - in a FreeBSD server we > going to start building next week. The DPT controller typically - > what we have done with Linux, NT and Novell installations - creates > a RAID stack (0, 0/1, 1, 5, etc.) that is managed by it's BIOS and > them serves up the stack to the OS as a single, contiguous drive > (ie- RAID0 with 4, 4GB drives; the OS only sees 1, 16GB drive). DPT > says that this works the same way for BSD; I have no personal > knowledge yet on this point. > > Question #2) Presuming that DPT will actually perform this way with > FreeBSD, am I better off letting the controller handle the RAID > stack (my hunch is, "Yes.", for performance reasons) in FreeBSD too, > or should I use "vinum". I have no personal "vinum" experience as > yet so needed to ask. If you're running a hardware RAID array, you don't need Vinum. If you're running Vinum, you don't need a hardware RAID array. I've been trying to get the information from the DPT web site, but it's off the net (disk failure? :-). Note that FreeBSD currently doesn't support the SmartRAID 5. If that's what you're getting, you'll have to find a different operating system for it. > BTW, the controller will/would be managing 5, 18.2GB UW SCSI drives in a > hot-swap RAID5 stack with 64MB ECC EDO RAM. > > I am going to read through the man pages here in a moment; just wanted > to see if someone had some experience doing this as the man pages aren't > always the most current data source. In the case of Vinum, they are. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message