1 file system, 2 drives?

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi, John--

On Jul 26, 2010, at 11:55 AM, John Almberg wrote:
> I know this is probably impossible, but FreeBSD can do so many miraculous things, that I can't help asking...
> 
> Is it possible to use the second drive to 'expand' the /videos file system? So it would miraculously look like a single 400G drive?

The canonical way of doing this is to either create a RAID-0 concat or stripe volume.  Using RAID-0 striping is preferred due to performance, but you'd need to backup, reformat using a RAID-0 stripe, and then restore your data onto the new volume.  In theory, setting up a concat is less intrusive, but if the data is already mounted and in use, you'll probably still need to unmount it first.

If you have hardware controller with RAID capabilities, using native RAID is better, otherwise look towards gvinum or maybe ccd; see also:

  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/raid.html

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck