From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jul 29 09:19:21 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8B87937B401 for ; Tue, 29 Jul 2003 09:19:21 -0700 (PDT) Received: from lava.sentex.ca (pyroxene.sentex.ca [199.212.134.18]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AAFB743F85 for ; Tue, 29 Jul 2003 09:19:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mike@sentex.net) Received: from simian.sentex.net (simeon.sentex.ca [192.168.43.27]) by lava.sentex.ca (8.12.9/8.12.8) with ESMTP id h6TGJHRa060103; Tue, 29 Jul 2003 12:19:17 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from mike@sentex.net) Message-Id: <5.2.0.9.0.20030729121125.08ab9370@209.112.4.2> X-Sender: mdtpop@209.112.4.2 (Unverified) X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.2.0.9 Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 12:20:59 -0400 To: darryl@osborne-ind.com, From: Mike Tancsa In-Reply-To: <006901c355eb$0b914090$0701a8c0@darryl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed X-Virus-Scanned: By Sentex Communications (lava/20020517) Subject: Re: Calling all raid experts X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:19:21 -0000 While RAID5 gives efficient use of disk space for situations where you have 5 drives, its NOT a substitute for backups nor is it necessarily the best thing to use depending on the application. Writes for example are VERY slow and depending on the card, direct reads can not be that great either. Having a mirror of your file system containing /home/data/very-important-big-file will not stop rm /home/data/very-important-big-file It just obliterates it off all your drives. If you do a lot of reading and writing of the disk, RAID5 is not necessarily the best. With IDE drives dirt cheap, consider something like RAID1+0 (aka RAID10). It offers the best of speed and safety, at the expense of space. In some cases, RAID1 might do you well. With the 3ware cards, reads are optimized and writes are hardly penalized. If you need a lot of space, consider the 3ware cards. Solid FreeBSD support, are relatively inexpensive, and have done me VERY well over the years. ---Mike At 10:26 AM 29/07/2003 -0500, Darryl Hoar wrote: >Greetings, >I need to build a file server for our marketing departments documents >and images. I want to use Freebsd. Since the data is large, and >backups would be difficult I was wondering if RAID would be a solution. > >I thought that RAID 5 would be the ticket, but after reading up on it, >maybe not. > >Isn't RAID 5 the one where if a disk fails, you plug a new one it and it >regenerates the lost data ? > >thanks, >Darryl >_______________________________________________ >freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list >http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions >To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"