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Date:      Mon, 3 Nov 2008 10:09:15 -0500
From:      John Nielsen <lists@jnielsen.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Cc:        Brent Clark <brentgclarklist@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: raid tool
Message-ID:  <200811031009.15922.lists@jnielsen.net>
In-Reply-To: <490F0881.2030809@gmail.com>
References:  <490F0881.2030809@gmail.com>

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On Monday 03 November 2008 09:19:45 am Brent Clark wrote:
> New to BSD, Using FreeBSD 7.
> I need to build a test fileserver,  but I want it to use Raid 5.
> Googling says I must use vinum.

You have a few options, but strictly speaking the best-supported way to do 
RAID5 in FreeBSD is to use gvinum (vinum's GEOM-ified successor). It is 
part of the base system and not in ports.

There is also an unofficial geom_raid5 module, but last I was aware it 
still had some issues (and you'd have to grab the source and built it 
manually).

> Looking in the ports I see its not available. The links / sites google
> suggests were moderately old, so my question is, whats the tool for
> raid?

If you replace "raid5" with "redundancy and n-1 capacity" then you could 
also look at geom_raid3, which is much simpler to configure than gvinum 
and also part of the base system. Additionally, FreeBSD 7.x has 
experimental support for ZFS (again in the base system and not in ports). 
That includes raidz, which is designed to have all of the good features 
of raid5 and none of the bad. I use it and it works well but you will 
need to do some reading and some manual tuning of your system. You'll 
also want a system with plenty of RAM and preferrably running 
FreeBSD-amd64 (vs FreeBSD-i386).

If you want to look in to RAID1 or RAID1+0 see geom_mirror and 
geom_stripe, also in the base system.

JN




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