RAID5 on FreeBSD 6 or 7

[Nejc Skoberne]

Hey Peter,

> Is it vinum or gvinum (geom8) that is the utility to create a RAID5 volume..?
> Things like that gvinum lacks the 'stop' command etc.. makes me think
> that it's not production ready or that the source code has not matured enough.

actually gvinum is production-ready, it only doesn't implement all the features of
vinum. I've been using since 2006 and it works, but it is slow. I just played
with it this weekend again, you can check
http://nejc.skoberne.net/2008/11/gmirror-and-gvinum-on-the-same-drives/.

However, as I said, gvinum is slow. I also run graid5 and some say it is pretty
stable. I've been running it for a year on a non-production server and it works
for me, but haven't seen it in action, when a drive fails or something. It is
fast, though. See it's page on Wikipedia for more info. I'd use it more if it
was part of official FreeBSD release, but for now it is only available as a
patch (AFAIK).

Bye,
Nejc