I need further HDD advice before submitting order.

[Chuck Swiger]

freebsd.org at donnacha.com wrote:
> Hi Chuck, thanks for responding.

You're welcome.

>> ... For what it's worth, I'd rather have two 80GB drives in a RAID-1 
>> mirror than have my stuff on two seperate drives, but using software 
>> RAID like vinum/gvinum, you can still mirror 80GB onto the 200GB 
>> drive, and have an additional 120 GB of space left over. 
> 
> That does sound like a good idea, especially if it's something I can 
> introduce at a later stage.

You bet.  Power supplies fail more often than hard drives do, but drive 
failures with IDE disks are common enough that I prefer to use RAID-1 whenever 
possible for the boot drive.  If needed, add additional storage to handle the 
space for a database or whatever else is needed for this particular system.

>> [ You don't have to do anything about that now, if you do leave an 80 
>> GB chunk of space uncommitted on the big disk. ]
> 
> By uncommitted do you mean space that I keep completed unallocated or 
> can it be space in which, following Jeremy's suggestion, I create a 
> temporary file system that I keep empty until I learn how to use 
> vinum/gvinum?

It doesn't really matter which.  If you're not keeping important data there, 
you can try both.  Just allocate the space in the FDISK partition table, and 
use newfs directly, if you like, or slice it up using BSD partition table and 
do something else.

-- 
-Chuck