Re: Best way to create a large data space

On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 11:11:47AM -0400, John Nielsen wrote:
On Friday 14 July 2006 10:37, John Nielsen wrote:
On Thursday 13 July 2006 20:24, stan wrote:
On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 04:20:56PM -0400, John Nielsen wrote:
On Thursday 13 July 2006 08:34, stan wrote:
i have a Sun Ultra 40 with 4 500F SATA drives. I plan on using this
machine primarily for a large data storage requirement.

What I want is one large /data partition. Given all the choices for
doing this in FreeBSD (software) what's the "best" choice here? The
partio will be shared via SAMBA if that affects the thhinking here.

"Best" really depends on what your needs and goals are. Here's a quick
overview of what the choices ARE, based mostly on memory. Corrections
and additions welcome. I'll try to make some notes about pros and cons
as well.

Thanks for the nice summary.

The data will be backed up nightly, so I'll probably use gstirpe to get
the maximum capicty. RAID5 would not work very well with 3 x 500G
(asuuming that I can't use the 500G that I put the system on).

If that's really what you want to do then here are a couple more tips. You
can't boot from a gstripe volume, and when (not if) one of your drives goes
bad you'll be happier if you only lose your data and not your entire OS. So
plan to partition the drives and use gmirror for the base OS (since you can
boot from a gmirror volume). Make a relatively small partition (10GB?) at
the beginning of each drive. Make a gmirror volume using two or three of
them and install the OS to that volume. Use the remaining one or two small
partitions for swap or utility partitions. Then make your giant gstripe
volume out of the large partitions on all four drives.

Or better yet, make a gvinum RAID5 volume with the four large partitions.

K, I think I'm convinced. That would give me 1.5TB for my 2TB of physical
disk.

Got a pointer to docs on how to install the base OS on a RAID5 config?


--
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote - Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror
- New York Times 9/3/1967
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@xxxxxxxxxxx mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxx"

Relevant Pages

  • Re: gmirror disks vs partitions
    ... Apart from potentially avoiding a whole disk from being copied ... You divide a couple of identical drives proportionally ... in two partitions each, place a couple of the first ... partitions into gmirror and a couple of the second ...
    (freebsd-stable)
  • Re: External Hard Drive
    ... Also, with the cost of USB Thumb drives, I'm now ... I clone the main drive weekly to the second internal drive, ... and other things (five partitions). ... such as Acronis True Image to perform the cloning operation whatever ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Replace SCSI Drive
    ... from there you can manipulate other hard drives attached to the machine. ... It should 'just work' but watch out that you keep disk devices ... vi-a) Write a BSD partition table into the slice, then set up your required FreeBSD partitions: ... items under the 'Custom Install' to achieve the desired result. ...
    (freebsd-questions)
  • Re: Backing up the system
    ... IDE disks mounted in a removable trays, and each clone is bootable. ... When you clone the contents of your working drive to the destination drive (bearing in mind we're talking about removable internal drives in their mobile racks), the destination drive, being for all practical purposes an exact duplicate of the source drive, is bootable and there's no need to edit its boot.ini file. ... the context of archiving several bootable partitions on the same backup drive. ... one must be aware which of the multiple system partitions on a drive has been marked "active". ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Moving Along with Fedora!
    ... but I would like to know the windows equivalent of the Linux ... you "mount" them to the tree. ... all the letter designations for drives have disappeared. ... a drive, the partitions have device named like /dev/hda1 or /dev/hda2, ...
    (Fedora)