From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Sep 12 22:57:24 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from flake.decibel.org (flake.decibel.org [216.254.40.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4312637B403 for ; Wed, 12 Sep 2001 22:57:16 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 42143 invoked from network); 13 Sep 2001 05:57:15 -0000 Received: from garfield.aus.decibel.org (HELO nasby.net) (sysnasby@10.1.1.51) by flake.aus.decibel.org with SMTP; 13 Sep 2001 05:57:15 -0000 Message-ID: <3BA04ABA.F64ED3C0@nasby.net> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 00:57:14 -0500 From: "Jim C. Nasby" Organization: distributed.net X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en-US,en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gerti@BITart.com Cc: FreeBSD-Stable Subject: Re: Vinum vs. hardware RAID (was: RAID5) 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> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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