From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 4 20:52:22 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7C66F37B43C for ; Wed, 4 Apr 2001 20:52:18 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 5B8316ACB7; Thu, 5 Apr 2001 13:22:16 +0930 (CST) Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 13:22:16 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Patrick Calkins Cc: "Freebsd-Questions (E-mail)" Subject: Re: RAID Message-ID: <20010405132216.R42416@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <69DACACD9391054995E110C9B2819CFD0278E7@puke.oem.oemsupport.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <69DACACD9391054995E110C9B2819CFD0278E7@puke.oem.oemsupport.com>; from pcalkins@oemsupport.com on Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 05:19:31PM -0700 Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 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 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wednesday, 4 April 2001 at 17:19:31 -0700, Patrick Calkins wrote: > On Tuesday, April 03, 2001 5:18 PM, Greg Lehey wrote: >> On Tuesday, 3 April 2001 at 14:28:12 +0200, Vallo Kallaste wrote: >>> On Tue, Apr 03, 2001 at 01:16:10AM -0700, "Orville R. Weyrich, JR." >> wrote: >>> >>>> I happen to have come by six identical 4.3 GB SCSI hard drives, and was >>>> wondering about an inexpensive way to make a FreeBSD server that uses >>>> them. My manual on FreeBSD covers version 3.2 -- I realize there are >>>> newer versions, but my search of the FreeBSD web site doesn't turn up my >>>> answer. >>>> >>>> Is there a way to implement RAID-5 with a couple standard SCSI >>>> controllers (the kind at eBay for under $100) or do I need to buy a >>>> specialized RAID-5 controller card? >>>> >>>> Am I asking for too much? :-) If it isn't too much, where do I go from >>>> here? >>> >>> You can use vinum volume manager, look at >>> http://www.vinumvm.org/ >>> >>> Use recent -stable for implementing vinum and beware that RAID-5 is >>> considered somewhat buggy, at least that's what I gather from >>> postings in the lists. >> >> A couple of bugs have surfaced in the RAID-5 code recently. I have >> committed fixes for one, and the other is fixed but not committed. >> >>> Use two controllers, three disks each. >> >> That depends on the controllers. You could get away with one. > > Humm.. if the code for RAID is somewhat buggy, I was wondering what the big > sites (like Yahoo) use to get around this... I know that Yahoo uses FreeBSD, > and with a site as big as theirs I would think loss of data would be a top > priority for them, hence the implementation of RAID on those boxes... any > comments? Well, the code for RAID is not somewhat buggy, but we see bugs in all components from time to time. Nevertheless, hardware RAID currently has better resilience to things like power failures (battery backed RAM, for example). Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. If you don't, I may ignore the reply. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message