From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Sep 6 4:23:23 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from kendra.ne.mediaone.net (kendra.ne.mediaone.net [24.218.227.234]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 71F8237B403 for ; Thu, 6 Sep 2001 04:23:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from xena (xena.hh.kew.com [192.168.203.148]) by kendra.ne.mediaone.net (Postfix) with SMTP id 2BD2415543; Thu, 6 Sep 2001 07:23:19 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <00b301c136c6$5f3f6820$94cba8c0@xena> From: "Drew Derbyshire" To: , Cc: "FreeBSD-Stable" 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> Subject: Re: Vinum vs. hardware RAID (was: RAID5) Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 07:23:36 -0400 Organization: Kendra Electronic Wonderworks, Stoneham MA 02180 (http://www.kew.com) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 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 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gerd Knops" To: Cc: "FreeBSD-Stable" Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 8:00 PM Subject: Re: Vinum vs. hardware RAID (was: RAID5) > 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. Advantage: Automatic handling of drive failure. > I view the / and /usr partitions as more or less static, and only put > the partition containing user data on the RAID. I also put my user data on a seperate file system, but that's not a reason to avoid mirroring /usr. I don't mirror / only because of the booting issues. Too many "trivial" configuration and status files go on / and /usr, not the least of which is the passwd database. Unless you have / and /usr mounted as R/O, it's amazing how those creep file systems away from being the same as the manual mirror. > 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. You're using manual mirroring to take the place of tape backups. I believe the two are separate functions. Tape backups are cheaper and also automatic if you use AMANDA or whatever you prefer. Once you're backing up any sizable user data on RAID, putting / and /usr on the tape is a minor incremental cost. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message