Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 15:12:36 -0600 From: "John Nielsen" <stable@jnielsen.net> To: "Patrick Bihan-Faou" <patrick-fbsdstable@mindstep.com>, <stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: the new ATA driver vs. vinum Message-ID: <0fb301c2170c$df665ff0$0900a8c0@max> References: <DBEFLLCPEGLPEAGOPLIHIEEODKAA.patrick-fbsdstable@mindstep.com>
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----- Original Message ----- From: "Patrick Bihan-Faou" <patrick-fbsdstable@mindstep.com> To: <stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 12:50 PM Subject: the new ATA driver vs. vinum > Hi, > > After reading the atacontrol(8) and ata(4) man pages for FreeBSD 4.6 release > I have a question: what is the preferred method for setting up some RAID > volumes with FreeBSD 4.6, knowing that I don't need RAID on the boot > partition ? Should I run vinum or use the features from the new ata driver ? The answer to this, as you may have expected, is "it depends." There is a good discussion about hardware RAID vs. Vinum in section 1.9 of the "Bootstrapping Vinum" article at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vinum/ > The documentation on vinum is really large and good, however the warnings in > the man page (especially the one against removing debug code) are puzzling. > > The documentation of the RAID features of the new ata driver are scarce, and > after searching the FreeBSD site, I am still wondering how it should be > used. If someone can provide some pointers to more complete documentation, > this would be really welcome. > > At this time, it seems that we have two concurent systems for 'simple' RAID > setups using IDE drives. The question now is which one should be used, or > maybe which one is best for what use. Bear in mind that atacontrol is a utility to interact with a hardware ATA raid controller, and doesn't do RAID itself. Vinum allows you to do RAID without any special hardware. ATA RAID was possible in 4.5, you just had to rely on the RAID controller's BIOS to set it up and manage it if there was a problem. If you don't have a RAID controller and want some or all of the benefits of a RAID setup, then use vinum. If you do have a RAID controller then there is a choice, as you point out. Which choice is best depends on your hardware and on your goals in using a RAID setup. JN To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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