Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 00:57:14 -0500 From: "Jim C. Nasby" <jim@nasby.net> To: gerti@BITart.com Cc: FreeBSD-Stable <stable@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: Vinum vs. hardware RAID (was: RAID5) Message-ID: <3BA04ABA.F64ED3C0@nasby.net> References: <20010903142145.K10812-100000@topperwein.dyndns.org> <200109041749.KAA12474@mina.soco.agilent.com> <20010905084245.H85816@wantadilla.lemis.com> <20010905181858.W63459@enteract.com> <20010906000015.1014.qmail@camelot.bitart.com>
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While I can certainly understand your opinion (I think it makes a lot of sense in many cases), it still remains that many people don't care to go to the extra effort to keep two copies of / in sync. With a HW raid solution, you can simply toss the hardware in a box, configure the raid, and install your OS. There are some other features that many HW raid solutions have as well, such as automatically rebuilding on the fly and a much easier to learn graphical interface. I'm not saying that not having these features makes vinum inferior, but it does explain why many people still prefer a HW solution. Gerd Knops wrote: > > Jim C. Nasby wrote: > > > > On the same vein, is booting off of vinum in the works yet? I know > > it's been looked into... It seems that would be one of the biggest > > advantages that hardware raid has over vinum. > > > For some definition of advantage that is. > > I always prefer to NOT have / and /usr on a RAID. If the file system > gets corrupted (software bug, power/UPS failure, someone hits reset > button by accident, someone snags the power cable, bit rot causes > incorrect read and write back to the file system, you make a mistake > and delete some important file, or a million other causes) you are dead > in the water, since the RAID does it's duty and copies the flawed data > to all drives. > > I view the / and /usr partitions as more or less static, and only put > the partition containing user data on the RAID. If something important > changes in / or /usr, I mirror those to the backup disk manually. Now > if any of those partitions gets corrupted beyond repair (or beyond the > abilities of some remote operator), I simply have to swap the drives > and am back in business. I think a setup like this is actually safer. > > Just my $.02. > > Gerd -- Jim C. Nasby (aka Decibel!) jim@nasby.net Member: Triangle Fraternity, Sports Car Club of America Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 Windows: "Where do you want to go today?" Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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