gmirror on a laptop.

[Patrick Bowen]

Chuck Swiger wrote:

>Patrick Bowen wrote:
>  
>
>>I wanted to fiddle around with gmirror(8) on a Dell C-600 Laptop. It has
>>a 2-slice, 20 Gig HD, and I essentially wanted to mirror ad0s1 to ad0s2.
>>I realize this will put the HD under stress, but otherwise it seems
>>do-able.
>>
>>What I want to know is whether this is such an incredibly bad idea I
>>shouldn't even consider it --or-- it seems like a good way to get
>>familiar with gmirror, so go for it.
>>    
>>
>
>If you want to do this for the sake of practice, by all means, feel free.
>
>However, mirroring onto the same device is going to result in almost no benefit
>to reliability and will cause a very large performance hit, as well as reducing
>the usable amount of disk space in half.  (In other words, actually leaving the
>machine set up that way would be an incredibly bad idea.)
>
>  
>
Mr. Swiger;

I agree, except that I had anticipated absolutely *no* benefit to 
reliability. If the disk goes bad, then having a mirror on the same 
disk, different slice, would still give me...no disk. I simply wanted to 
get the practice by actually doing, instead of just reading about it. 
I'll probably re-install Slackware on the other slice when I get done 
playing around.

Thanks,
Patrick