Remo Lacho wrote:>On 6/4/2005 at 12:26 AM Hans F. Nordhaug wrote: > > > >>Dear list, >> >>I would like to use RAID-1 as a back-up solution. If one of the disk >>breaks I would like my server to continue to run from the other disk. >>I have followed the mailing list for a while and read some howtos, >>but I'm not sure if this is possible (without doing all kinds of tricks >>when the accidents happens - removing meta data and so on). In >>addition, I thought, gvinum was the way to go, but hasn't there been >>some problems with it (reported here lately)? I'm running 5.3 - what >>do you recommend - gvinum, ccd, others? What is the definitive howto for >>the recommend solution. Thx for your time. >> >>Regards, >>Hans >>... >> >> > >*********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** > >Good place to start: > ><http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/> > > > >Up to a point - beware of geom_mirror with USB and FireWire disks - it's temperamental at best and with my FireWire drives simple won't work reliably (panic during boot if a rebuild is needed and unrecoverable errors during rebuilds). I've just re-done the mirror set on my box with gvinum and so far it's looking good - it boots ok and rebuild is a lot faster. This on a 5-STABLE box with a FW800 card a 2x LaCie 500GB bigger disk extreme external FW drives. If this works for my next trick I'll try RAID5 with 4x250gb usb drives.
Remo Lacho wrote:>O > >>> >>> >>> >>Up to a point - beware of geom_mirror with USB and FireWire disks - it's >>temperamental at best and with my FireWire drives simple won't work >>reliably (panic during boot if a rebuild is needed and unrecoverable >>errors during rebuilds). I've just re-done the mirror set on my box >>with gvinum and so far it's looking good - it boots ok and rebuild is a >>lot faster. >> >>This on a 5-STABLE box with a FW800 card a 2x LaCie 500GB bigger disk >>extreme external FW drives. >> >>If this works for my next trick I'll try RAID5 with 4x250gb usb drives. >> >> > >*********** REPLY SEPARATOR *********** > >I feel your pain. :) > >Please excuse my ignorance, but why would you use USB or Firewire drives on a >production server? > > > >It's a home server and the storage is near-line photo archives (I'm a professional photographer) that's also backed up on REV cartridges. I don't need the performance of a multi thousand dollar server box just the storage capacity to host up to a terabyte of images. If I really needed the performace I'd build somthing with SCSI or SATA drives but I just need capacity. Currently the box has: IDE 80 GB main disk (root usr var tmp swap ) 1x250GB FW 400 - scratch storage 2x300GB FW 400 in a gstripe set - storage for BackupPC which covers the desktop boxes. 2x500GB FW 800 (on a separate FW800 controller) - this is going to be the photo archive in a gvinum mirror set. Then I have 4xUSB250GB drives that are not really doing anyting right now and I may build into a RAID5 for future expansion. John
On Jun 4, 2005, at 5:11 PM, Remo Lacho wrote:> Please excuse my ignorance, but why would you use USB or Firewire > drives on a > production server?Firewire makes a really nice hot-pluggable I/O bus which works nicely with external devices. Your typical external Firewire drive is generally a medium-decent IDE drive (ie, one with a 3-year warranty and more cache than the typical drive sold today) using an IDE->FW converter. Firewire is especially well suited to things like movie editting and other A/V work, and I'd rather use it than IDE for those kind of tasks. It's not clear that even Ultra320 SCSI is a better choice as an interface, although the highest-end SCSI drives are probably more reliable. You'd have to switch up to a fibre-channel SAN to get a system which is significantly faster or more fault-tolerant. [ I don't think so highly of USB2. ] -- -Chuck