your advice on vinum, RAIDs
Chuck Swiger
cswiger at mac.com
Thu Dec 29 06:31:14 PST 2005
Joe Auty wrote:
> I've been considering buying another hard drive for my FreeBSD machine,
> and building a RAID with my current hard drive so that both drives are
> treated as one.
This is known as RAID-1 mirroring.
> Do any of you have experience in this area? Is this advisable?
Yes and yes. :-)
> I'm assuming I'd be looking at creating a RAID-5?
Not with only two drives.
RAID-5 needs at least 3, and is wasteful unless you have 4-5.
> Can this be done without reformatting my current drive?
You can set up mirroring without reformatting, but be sure you have good backups
of your data regardless.
> Does this setup work well? Do you have any general advice for me? I need to
> know if there is risk involved here.
When choosing RAID levels, you are making a tradeoff between performance,
reliability, and cost:
If you prefer... ...consider using:
-----------------------------------------------
performance, reliability: RAID-1 mirroring
performance, cost: RAID-0 striping
reliability, performance: RAID-1 mirroring (+ hot spare, if possible)
reliability, cost: RAID-5 (+ hot spare)
cost, reliability: RAID-5
cost, performance: RAID-0 striping
If you've got enough drives, using RAID-10 or RAID-50 will also improve
performance compared to stock RAID-1 or RAID-5 modes.
--
-Chuck
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