vinum or gvinum on FreeBSD 5.4

[Paul Mather]

On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 10:39 +0200, Claus Guttesen wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> I may implement (g)vinum to stripe two 2 TB raid 5 volumes into a
> single 4 TB vinum-volume. The volumes reside on a atabeast doing the
> raid 5. The server is a 5.4 RC2 doing nfs on i386.
> 
> According to some threads gvinum may not be completely stable (in 5.3,
> http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/current/2004-11/0537.html)
> when doing raid 5 but works fine when striping.
> 
> Should I go vinum or gvinum? Will newfs have problems with a 4 TB
> volume? Are there any performance-degradation doing striping?

In addition to vinum and gvinum, have you considered geom_stripe?  See
gstripe(8) for details.  I've been using it for a while on 5-STABLE to
join two 65 GB slices on two different drives into a single 130 GB
device (/dev/stripe/data in my case).  I have had no stability problems,
which is why I mention this as a possible solution for you if you're
worried about the stability of vinum or gvinum in 5.x.

Cheers,

Paul.
-- 
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

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