Vinum & GVinum Recommendations

[Drew Tomlinson]

I am using 4.11 and have been a FBSD user since the beginning of version 
4.  I successfully used vinum to create concatenated volumes that have 
grown over time.  Vinum has proved very stable as long as the drives 
were IDE or SCSI.  However I outgrew the confines of my case and added a 
firewire enclosure that contains two IDE drives.  This was somewhere 
around 4.6.

Initially, the firewire drives worked well once I learned I needed to 
set the SCSI delay kernel config option back up to 15 secs from 5 
(unfortunately I lost my volumes getting that education).  But when I 
upgraded from 4.9 to 4.10, vinum and the firewire devices didn't play 
well.  I posted about it here:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2004-December/069290.html

Later, I discovered there was an spb timeout issue that might be part of 
the problem and I posted about it here:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-firewire/2005-February/000331.html

Anyway, I've been using the delete/create vinum volume workaround after 
every reboot as I never found a solution.  But this last time, I lost 
both vinum volumes performing that workaround.  I don't know what 
happened exactly other than fsck started getting disk errors.  At the 
first problem, I answered 'n' and aborted the fsck.  I tried the 
delete/create workaround again but was unable to stop or rm the 
subdisks, plexes, drives, etc.  Then I rebooted. did the delete/create 
thing, but no longer could fsck read the disks.

Without going on and on, the bottom line is that now I've lost both 
vinum volumes again.  Since the bulk of my system is gone (I sure hope 
the tapes I have are good), I've decided to consider moving up to 
version 5.  I've googled for info on gvinum but see a lot of posts about 
it being "flaky".  What's it's status at this time?  I really like 
having one large concatenated drive for storing my digital pictures, 
video, etc. but at this point, stability is more important.  Also, how 
does ccd work with 5?

I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences with vinum, gvinum, and ccd, 
especially as they relate to firewire devices.

Thanks,

Drew

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