From owner-freebsd-geom@FreeBSD.ORG Wed May 9 16:00:12 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9A25416A400 for ; Wed, 9 May 2007 16:00:12 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rick@kiwi-computer.com) Received: from kiwi-computer.com (keira.kiwi-computer.com [63.224.10.3]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2888513C455 for ; Wed, 9 May 2007 16:00:12 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from rick@kiwi-computer.com) Received: (qmail 22829 invoked by uid 2001); 9 May 2007 16:00:18 -0000 Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 11:00:18 -0500 From: "Rick C. Petty" To: Jonathan Dobbie Message-ID: <20070509160018.GB22504@keira.kiwi-computer.com> References: <4641DE02.3000706@mcad.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <4641DE02.3000706@mcad.edu> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Cc: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Nesting gvinum? X-BeenThere: freebsd-geom@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: rick-freebsd@kiwi-computer.com List-Id: GEOM-specific discussions and implementations List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 16:00:12 -0000 On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 09:43:14AM -0500, Jonathan Dobbie wrote: > > I was hoping to have something like md+LVM where I could change the size > of RAID 5 volumes. Could I have a large gvinum raid-5 volume and then > make 3 gvinum volumes on top that could be resized? Except for the nesting, this is precisely what gvinum does. Why do you need nesting? Resizing volumes is something gvinum is supposed to be able to do. > Also, is there a better fs to use on top of gvinum? Unlinks and file > creation "feel" slow to me. I thought about reiser, but my coworker was UFS2. It's incredibly fast, even with RAID5 underneath. > burned the last time he put it on a production box and we've been rather > cautious since. I wasn't aware that FreeBSD supported reiser. > Didn't UFS2 come out for freeBSD a while ago? I'm as of 5.0, in the 2002-2003 timeframe. > I know that shelling out the 250$ for a raid card is the best option, > but no one with a budget wants to put any money into the box. Not really. Software RAID has been proven to be faster than hardware numerous times. I read somewhere that this has to do with the transfer blocksize or something. I haven't witnessed this myself, but I've seen gstripe & gmirror outperform RAID0/1 cards. -- Rick C. Petty