secondary ide drive setup

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 11/28/06, Jerry McAllister <jerrymc at msu.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 09:24:30PM -0500, David Banning wrote:
>
> > I am attempting to setup a secondary ide drive. I have configured the
> > entire 305MB drive for storage. I used /stand/sysinstall and -it-
> > issued the command ;
> >
> > /bin/sh -c newfs -b 16384 -f 2048 /dev/ad2s1e
> >
> > which seems very disk intensive and is taking a long time. I am wondering
> > if this is right. I just want to use the second drive as a storage folder
> > for backing up the main drive.
> >
> > The disklabel editor shows it as
> >
> > Disk: ad2       Partition name: ad2s1   Free: 0 blocks (0MB)
> >
> > Part      Mount          Size Newfs   Part      Mount          Size Newfs
> > ----      -----          ---- -----   ----      -----          ---- -----
> > ad2s1e    /uusr       305242MBUFS+S Y
> >
> > This configuration issued the command as above;
> >
> > /bin/sh -c newfs -b 16384 -f 2048 /dev/ad2s1e
> >
> > How long should newfs take for a 305 MB drive?
> >
>
> Do you really mean 305 GB drive?
>                        ^^
> It depends some on your CPU and the speed of the drive.
> My guess would be in the range of 15 minutes or so.
> It has to write all the alternate superblocks.   I haven't
> studied it, but I have always wondered if it is necessary to
> have so many alternate superblocks.

You can, of course, bsdlabel* and newfs without touching
sysinstall.

I have not played with it tons, but I suspect that the number
of alternate superblocks is dependant on the -b flag to
newfs.  I remember running into a (or what seemed a) rather
conservative maximum for this value, 65536, I seem to recall.

If you are primarily going to be writing very large files, like
tar files, there should be no harm in having a very large block
size and sparse inodes, though changing it might require
a wipe and a newfs, should you decide to make the disk your
databse storage for a couple million 1k files.


*I am just now reading man gpt, and let me tell you, I am both
frightened and a bit confused.

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