Request for opinions - gvinum or ccd?

Mike Meyer mwm-keyword-freebsdhackers2.e313df at mired.org
Sat May 30 19:12:16 UTC 2009


On Sat, 30 May 2009 18:52:39 +0100
xorquewasp at googlemail.com wrote:
> Simple question then as the handbook describes both ccd and gvinum -
> which should I pick?

My first reaction was "neither", then I realized - you didn't say what
version of FreeBSD you're running. But if you're running a supported
version of FreeBSD, that doesn't change my answer.

If you're running 5.3 or later, you probably want gstripe. If you're
running something older than that, then gvinum won't be available
either, so you'll need to use ccd. I always figured gvinum was a
transition tool to help move from vinum to geom, which is why it's
managed to get to the 7.0 release with some pretty painful bugs in it,
which don't show up in gstripe.

The handbook clearly needs to be rewritten - ccd isn't supported
anymore, except via the geom ccd class. However, I think zfs is going
to change it all again, so such a rewrite wont' be useful for very
long. I don't think zfs supports a two-disk stripe, thought it does do
JBOD.

If you're running a 7.X 64-bit system with a couple of GIG of ram,
expect it to be in service for years without having to reformat the
disks, and can afford another drive, I'd recommend going to raidz on a
three-drive system. That will give you close to the size/performance
of your RAID0 system, but let you lose a disk without losing data. The
best you can do with zfs on two disks is a mirror, which means write
throughput will suffer.


    <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.

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