your advice on vinum, RAIDs

[Joe Auty]

On Dec 29, 2005, at 4:14 AM, Robert Slade wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 06:09, Joe Auty wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I've been considering buying another hard drive for my FreeBSD
>> machine, and building a RAID with my current hard drive so that both
>> drives are treated as one.
>>
>> Do any of you have experience in this area? Is this advisable? I'm
>> assuming I'd be looking at creating a RAID-5? Can this be done
>> without reformatting my current drive? Does this setup work well? Do
>> you have any general advice for me? I need to know if there is risk
>> involved here.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks in advance!
>
> Joe,
>
> It depends on what you need to do. If you just want data integrity  
> then
> you need raid 1 - mirroring and GEOM is your friend. There is a good
> section in the Handbook on setting a GEOM raid 1 without formatting  
> the
> original drive.
>
>
> If you are also looking for more drive space, then raid 5 gives a
> measure of both.
>
> In both cases, the warning of backing up the system first applies.
>


Hmmm..... What I need is more drive space. Should I look at GEOM  
rather than vinum? Do you know whether the drives would need to be  
reformatted in order to setup the RAID?

I'll definitely heed your advice on backing up the drive first!







-----------
Joe Auty
NetMusician: web publishing software for musicians
http://www.netmusician.org
joe at netmusician.org