From owner-freebsd-fs Tue Jan 21 7:15:12 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 28ABB37B401 for ; Tue, 21 Jan 2003 07:15:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from flood.ping.uio.no (flood.ping.uio.no [129.240.78.31]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E1C0843EB2 for ; Tue, 21 Jan 2003 07:15:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from des@ofug.org) Received: by flood.ping.uio.no (Postfix, from userid 2602) id AEA4B536E; Tue, 21 Jan 2003 16:15:07 +0100 (CET) X-URL: http://www.ofug.org/~des/ X-Disclaimer: The views expressed in this message do not necessarily coincide with those of any organisation or company with which I am or have been affiliated. To: fs@freebsd.org Subject: RAID alternatives From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 16:15:06 +0100 Message-ID: Lines: 32 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090007 (Oort Gnus v0.07) Emacs/21.2 (i386--freebsd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I'm planning a new system to replace my aging 350 MHz K6-2, and am considering various options for increasing disk performance and reliability. I'm thinking of running RAID level 5 across three or four identical IDE disks. The question is what RAID solution to pick: - Software RAID (free, but can't boot from it, and possibly not 100% reliable). Options include: - RAIDframe: "should be considered highly experimental". Any experiences with this? Does it work? Is it fast? Is it reliable? I see it requires wiring down the drive IDs, which vinum doesn't IIRC. - Vinum: I've had mixed experiences with this. There have been some embarassing bugs, particularly in the recovery code, and it has had a tendency to crash the system. Has it improved with age? - GEOM: might be an option in a year or so, but not now. - Hardware RAID (more expensive, but less hassle and possibly higher performance). The problem here is that IDE RAID controllers don't seem to support RAID 4 or 5; they only support RAID 0, which is pointless on its own; RAID 1, which is horribly wasteful; and JBOD, which is just a fancy name for disk concatenation, and is even more pointless than RAID 0. The exception seems to be the 3ware 7500 series - which FreeBSD doesn't seem to support. I'd be happy to be contradicted :) DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message