1 file system, 2 drives?

[krad]

On 26 July 2010 20:05, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:

> Hi, John--
>
> On Jul 26, 2010, at 11:55 AM, John Almberg wrote:
> > I know this is probably impossible, but FreeBSD can do so many miraculous
> things, that I can't help asking...
> >
> > Is it possible to use the second drive to 'expand' the /videos file
> system? So it would miraculously look like a single 400G drive?
>
> The canonical way of doing this is to either create a RAID-0 concat or
> stripe volume.  Using RAID-0 striping is preferred due to performance, but
> you'd need to backup, reformat using a RAID-0 stripe, and then restore your
> data onto the new volume.  In theory, setting up a concat is less intrusive,
> but if the data is already mounted and in use, you'll probably still need to
> unmount it first.
>
> If you have hardware controller with RAID capabilities, using native RAID
> is better, otherwise look towards gvinum or maybe ccd; see also:
>
>  http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/raid.html
>
> Regards,
> --
> -Chuck
>
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I dont agree that hardware raid is necessarily better. It really depends on
what the system is doing. If for example it is purely acting as a filer I
would always use software raid. The main reason for this is that you benefit
from the faster CPU, and more intelligent raid software (zfs). You are also
not tied to a particular hardware platform which makes future upgrades
easier.

If however the system is doing lots of other things and you dont want the
overhead of a software raid solution, it makes  sense to offload it to a
hardware solution