large RAID volume partition strategy

[Vivek Khera]

On Aug 17, 2007, at 7:31 PM, Ivan Voras wrote:

> Depending on your allowable downtime after a crash, fscking even a  
> 1 TB
> UFS file system can be a long time. For large file systems there's
> really no alternative to using -CURRENT / 7.0, and either gjournal  
> or ZFS.

I'll investigate this option.  Does anyone know the stability  
reliability of the mpt(4) driver on CURRENT?  Is it out of GIANT lock  
yet?  It was hard to tell from the TODO list if it is entirely free  
of GIANT or not.

My only fear of this is that once this system is in production,  
that's pretty much it.  Maintenance windows are about 1 year apart,  
usually longer.

>
> When you get there, you'll need to create 1 small RAID volume (<= 1  
> GB)
> from which to boot (and probably use it for root) and use the rest for
> whatever your choice is (doesn't really matter at this point). This is
> because you can't have fdisk or bsdlabel partitions larger than 2  
> TB and
> you can't boot from GPT.

So what your saying here is that I can't do either my option 1 or 2,  
but have to create smaller volumes exported as individual drives?  Or  
just that I can't do 1, because my case 2 I could make three 2Tb  
fdisk slices which bsdlabel can then partition?