your advice on vinum, RAIDs
Joe Auty
joe at netmusician.org
Thu Dec 29 07:12:03 PST 2005
Some great advice here!
What RAID level would you recommend for simply maximizing the hard
disk space I have available? This is just my personal backup machine
and will consist of two drives, so I don't need kick ass performance,
and I don't need my files mirrored. I take it that striping is what I
need to look at? RAID-0? Can I setup striping without reformatting,
or only mirroring?
Sorry, still learning the basics here....
On Dec 29, 2005, at 9:31 AM, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> 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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