your advice on vinum, RAIDs

[Robert Slade]

On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 15:05, Joe Auty wrote:
> On Dec 29, 2005, at 4:14 AM, Robert Slade wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 06:09, Joe Auty wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> Do any of you have experience in this area? Is this advisable? I'm
> >> assuming I'd be looking at creating a RAID-5? Can this be done
> >> without reformatting my current drive? Does this setup work well? Do
> >> you have any general advice for me? I need to know if there is risk
> >> involved here.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Thanks in advance!
> >
> > Joe,
> >
> > It depends on what you need to do. If you just want data integrity  
> > then
> > you need raid 1 - mirroring and GEOM is your friend. There is a good
> > section in the Handbook on setting a GEOM raid 1 without formatting  
> > the
> > original drive.
> >
> >
> > If you are also looking for more drive space, then raid 5 gives a
> > measure of both.
> >
> > In both cases, the warning of backing up the system first applies.
> >
> 
> 
> Hmmm..... What I need is more drive space. Should I look at GEOM  
> rather than vinum? Do you know whether the drives would need to be  
> reformatted in order to setup the RAID?
> 
> I'll definitely heed your advice on backing up the drive first!

Joe,

I if you are not worried about integrity, I would leave Raid alone. To
add more space, just the drive and mount it. I have just added more
space on a machine by mounting a new drive as /data and copying the home
dirs across then relinking the /home dir to home. 

Have a look at:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks-adding.html

Rob