Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 16:15:06 +0100 From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> To: fs@freebsd.org Subject: RAID alternatives Message-ID: <xzp4r82y1ol.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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I'm planning a new system to replace my aging 350 MHz K6-2, and am considering various options for increasing disk performance and reliability. I'm thinking of running RAID level 5 across three or four identical IDE disks. The question is what RAID solution to pick: - Software RAID (free, but can't boot from it, and possibly not 100% reliable). Options include: - RAIDframe: "should be considered highly experimental". Any experiences with this? Does it work? Is it fast? Is it reliable? I see it requires wiring down the drive IDs, which vinum doesn't IIRC. - Vinum: I've had mixed experiences with this. There have been some embarassing bugs, particularly in the recovery code, and it has had a tendency to crash the system. Has it improved with age? - GEOM: might be an option in a year or so, but not now. - Hardware RAID (more expensive, but less hassle and possibly higher performance). The problem here is that IDE RAID controllers don't seem to support RAID 4 or 5; they only support RAID 0, which is pointless on its own; RAID 1, which is horribly wasteful; and JBOD, which is just a fancy name for disk concatenation, and is even more pointless than RAID 0. The exception seems to be the 3ware 7500 series - which FreeBSD doesn't seem to support. I'd be happy to be contradicted :) DES -- Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message
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