freebsd stable - May 2005 - State of gvinum RELENG_5 or RELENG_5_4 ?!

All:

I've been asked to setup a RAID-5 server using software raid. I've not
worked with gvinum or vinum for that matter. I know from following the
mailing lists there have been some concerns over gvinum in the
5.3-RELEASE. How are things working today?

The plan would be use a 40GB ATA/100 Drive for the system and 4 SATA
drives for the RAID-5 array. Will gvinum be happy with this kind of
arrangement?

Thanks in advance


Ed

Edwin Brown wrote:
>All:
>
>I've been asked to setup a RAID-5 server using software raid. I've
not
>worked with gvinum or vinum for that matter. I know from following the
>mailing lists there have been some concerns over gvinum in the
>5.3-RELEASE. How are things working today?
>
>The plan would be use a 40GB ATA/100 Drive for the system and 4 SATA
>drives for the RAID-5 array. Will gvinum be happy with this kind of
>arrangement?
>
Well, you want to stay away from vinum in 5.x.  Under 5.3 gvinum and 
raid 5 was not robust, and I could kill a system and corrupt the array 
by pulling a drive.  I haven't tried lately, but i'd definitly want to 
do some serious testing before putting that into production.  If you 
really need raid 5, I'd look into a H/W based solution.

and yes, I filed PR's that so far have not been answered.

jim

Gabor Esperon wrote:
>
> How reliable is the gmirror subsystem?
gmirror seems fine as best as I can tell.  I've been running it for a 
few months on sata drives.

jim