Best way to create a large data space

[John Nielsen]

On Friday 14 July 2006 10:37, John Nielsen wrote:
> On Thursday 13 July 2006 20:24, stan wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 04:20:56PM -0400, John Nielsen wrote:
> > > On Thursday 13 July 2006 08:34, stan wrote:
> > > >  i have a Sun Ultra 40 with 4 500F SATA drives. I plan on using this
> > > >  machine primarily for a large data storage requirement.
> > > >
> > > >  What I want is one large /data partition. Given all the choices for
> > > > doing this in FreeBSD (software) what's the "best" choice here? The
> > > > partio will be shared via SAMBA if that affects the thhinking here.
> > >
> > > "Best" really depends on what your needs and goals are. Here's a quick
> > > overview of what the choices ARE, based mostly on memory. Corrections
> > > and additions welcome. I'll try to make some notes about pros and cons
> > > as well.
> >
> > Thanks for the nice summary.
> >
> > The data will be backed up nightly, so I'll probably use gstirpe to get
> > the maximum capicty. RAID5 would not work very well with 3 x 500G
> > (asuuming that I can't use the 500G that I put the system on).
>
> If that's really what you want to do then here are a couple more tips. You
> can't boot from a gstripe volume, and when (not if) one of your drives goes
> bad you'll be happier if you only lose your data and not your entire OS. So
> plan to partition the drives and use gmirror for the base OS (since you can
> boot from a gmirror volume). Make a relatively small partition (10GB?) at
> the beginning of each drive. Make a gmirror volume using two or three of
> them and install the OS to that volume. Use the remaining one or two small
> partitions for swap or utility partitions. Then make your giant gstripe
> volume out of the large partitions on all four drives.

Or better yet, make a gvinum RAID5 volume with the four large partitions.

I think the only tool in my original list that requires you to use the entire 
disk is ataraid(4).

JN