Questions about adding new disk

Daniel Johansson donnex at donnex.net
Mon Oct 2 13:19:21 PDT 2006


Hello, I've just bought two new Seagate SATA drives and a Promise TX4 
SATA300 controller. The disks and the controller is working fine but I'm 
a little confused how I should setup them.

First of all I'm running FreeBSD 6.1. The disks are two 320 GB drives 
who I'm going to use for storage. Backups, movies, music etc.

I've read the handbook about adding new disks and I've got them setup 
but here are my questions.

1. Should I use soft updates or not on the new disks? The handbook 
doesn't mention anything about using -U to newfs to setup soft updates. 
The installer is using it on the system disks but is it a bad idea to 
use it on storage disks or why isn't it mention in the handbook?

2. Is it a bad idea to use tunefs -m 0 ? I don't need any space reserved 
for root at the disks but the man page mentions that I'll loose 
performance when using -m 0. Will it be so much that the extra space 
isn't worth the performance loss?

3. Should I use tunefs -o space or time? I guess space is the way to go 
but again how much of a performance loss is there?

If you replay to this email could you please CC it to me as I'm not 
subscribed to this list.

Thank you for you help.


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