I need further HDD advice before submitting order.

Jerry McAllister jerrymc at clunix.cl.msu.edu
Wed May 11 13:57:04 PDT 2005


> 
> Chuck and Jerry, thank you so much.
> 
> Chuck - I'm going to take your advice on setting up some kind of mirror, 
> software RAID or whatever, thanks.
> 
> Jerry - that breakdown of how you would allocate space was amazing - 
> seriously, a better division and a better explanation than anything I've 
> found in the FreeBSD books.
> 
> The idea of allocating almost the entire 2nd drive to /spill is great, 
> that will give me all the flexibility I need, brilliant!  Some

There are many thought of how to set up disk based on the need
and also on history.   Some people have habits built from when
disks were small.   The one difficulty of having one giant partition
is making backups.   Unless you use some very large media, it will
take more than one piece of media (tape, etc) and that tends to
discourage people from making backups.

This type of scheme makes it pretty simple to add additional large
disks later (for /spill2, /spill3, etc) if you need them too and just 
do some additional moving, though if you have a really big disk farm, it
begins to get too difficult to manage.   Then you would have to come
up with a more sophisticated system.

One small modification, as someone noted, if you make a vinum or mirror,
you will probably not want the chunk of swap to be on the front of
the second drive.   So, you can make it last without too much difficult.

////jerry



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