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Date:      Wed, 21 Mar 2007 07:39:26 -0800
From:      "Peter A. Giessel" <pgiessel@mac.com>
To:        John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net>
Cc:        Gabriel Rossetti <rossettigab@charter.net>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Best software raid 5 software?
Message-ID:  <460151AE.1010705@mac.com>
In-Reply-To: <200703211033.03337.lists@jnielsen.net>
References:  <4600D8D9.3010401@charter.net> <200703211033.03337.lists@jnielsen.net>

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On 2007/03/21 6:33, John Nielsen seems to have typed:
> On Wednesday 21 March 2007 03:03:53 am Gabriel Rossetti wrote:
>> I am about to switch to software raid 5 for my personal server. I know
>> hardware raid 5 is better, but being a student I'd rather not invest in
>> a raid adapter now, plus my cpu is being used at about 0.0% 24/24 7/7,
>> so it needs some exercise :-)
>>
>> I've heard of several software-based raid-5 projects, mainly of Vinum,
>> has anybody tested it or any other ones?
>> Which would you suggest?
> 
> As far as I know, gvinum is the only software package in FreeBSD that can do 
> RAID 5. The initial learning curve is a bit steep, but it should work fine 
> once you get it configured.

There is also a geom_raid5 class, which you can find out about by
searching the freebsd-geom mailing list:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/search.cgi?words=graid5&max=250&source=freebsd-geom
I don't think its quite ready for prime-time though.

Vinum did not make the transition to Gvinum as cleanly as could be
desired, so if you setup a gvinum array, I would recommend keeping good
backups and testing it pretty harshly to make sure it will cleanly
survive a drive failure.  Gvinum has been getting significantly better
with time, but as with anything before putting it into a production
environment, test it throughly (and keep good backups, did I mention
that keeping good backups is important?  Because good backups are
important...)



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