comments on newfs raw disk ? Safe ? (7 terabyte array)

[Indigo]

Hi,
does that mean that slicing and partitioning additional drives has no  
advantages on a purely FreeBSD machine?

Vasek

On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:12:07 +0100, Ivan Voras <ivoras at fer.hr> wrote:

> Arone Silimantia wrote:
>
>> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 bs=1k count=1
>> newfs -m 0 /dev/da1
>> mount /dev/da1 /mnt
>>
>> And that's that.  But it seems too good to be true!  Can someone please
>> comment on this scheme and if there are some hidden dangers or lack of
>> functionality that I will regret in the future ?
>
> No dangers at the system level - you can create your file system on any
> storage-like device, use it and mount it any way you want. Raw disks are
> a perfectly valid target.
>
>> Will it fsck just like any other UFS2 partition I run ?  Can I run
>> quotas and snapshots and everything else on it, just like normal ?
>
> Yes.
>
>> Other than the fact that I can't boot this, is there _any downside
>> whatsoever_ to newfs'ing raw disk like this ?
>
> Only "collateral" problems because of the partition size: a regular
> (non-softupdates) fsck will take a LONG time to finish and eat a LOT of
> memory while it's doing its stuff. You'll need a lot of swap space (1GB
> per TB? someone had empirical numbers on this, I'm sure) if you think
> you'll need to fsck it entirely. Creating snapshots will also take a
> long time on it, and you probably want to search the lists for
> recommendations about creating snapshots in a second level directory in
> order not to block the root directory. Related to this is
> background-fsck which works by creating snapshots, so you'll probably
> want to disable it.
>
> In any case, try every feature you think you'll need before deploying it.
>
> Also, write about your experience on this list :)
>
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