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Date:      Sat, 24 Jul 1999 09:44:30 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Roy Bettle <rbettle@criterion-group.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: Vinum/RAID questions.
Message-ID:  <19990724094430.G84734@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <3798AA84.87CAABC6@criterion-group.com>; from Roy Bettle on Fri, Jul 23, 1999 at 10:46:45AM -0700
References:  <3798AA84.87CAABC6@criterion-group.com>

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On Friday, 23 July 1999 at 10:46:45 -0700, Roy Bettle wrote:
> Good morning all!  Two quick vinum/RAID questions:
>
> Question #1)  Is it possible to create a boot/install floppy that loads
> vinum?  I have 2, 1.2 GB EIDE drives and would like to have them seen as
> one for the install if this is possible.

No, that's not possible yet, but it will be Real Soon Now.

> We are intending to us the DPT PM3334UW/3 -
> http://www.dpt.com/products/pm3334uw.html - in a FreeBSD server we
> going to start building next week.  The DPT controller typically -
> what we have done with Linux, NT and Novell installations - creates
> a RAID stack (0, 0/1, 1, 5, etc.) that is managed by it's BIOS and
> them serves up the stack to the OS as a single, contiguous drive
> (ie- RAID0 with 4, 4GB drives; the OS only sees 1, 16GB drive).  DPT
> says that this works the same way for BSD; I have no personal
> knowledge yet on this point.
>
> Question #2) Presuming that DPT will actually perform this way with
> FreeBSD, am I better off letting the controller handle the RAID
> stack (my hunch is, "Yes.", for performance reasons) in FreeBSD too,
> or should I use "vinum".  I have no personal "vinum" experience as
> yet so needed to ask.

If you're running a hardware RAID array, you don't need Vinum.  If
you're running Vinum, you don't need a hardware RAID array.

I've been trying to get the information from the DPT web site, but
it's off the net (disk failure? :-).  Note that FreeBSD currently
doesn't support the SmartRAID 5.  If that's what you're getting,
you'll have to find a different operating system for it.

> BTW, the controller will/would be managing 5, 18.2GB UW SCSI drives in a
> hot-swap RAID5 stack with 64MB ECC EDO RAM.
>
> I am going to read through the man pages here in a moment; just wanted
> to see if someone had some experience doing this as the man pages aren't
> always the most current data source.

In the case of Vinum, they are.

Greg
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