Boot software raid?

chancey

chancey

Coming from a background of linux (specifically fedora) its very easy to setup raid1 during the install process, but I couldn't see the same options in the freebsd installer ... is this possible?

Not as important but is UFS2 the only supported bootable OS, does the boot loader support ZFS yet - which would eliminate the need for software raid to get the same effect?
 
kpa said:
You can convert to RAID1 after finishing the installation. I just converted my 8.1-RC2 system to gmirror RAID1 using the instructions from the handbook:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/geom-mirror.html

I used
Code: 
-b load
instead of
Code: 
-b round-robin
but otherwise followed the guide to the letter.

Worked out of the box and was much easier to setup than md raid on Linux :e
Click to expand...

This is more a mirror than raid, like a replacement on failure. If I have 2 disks i'd like to see twice the read speed ... ZFS would be the ideal option but thats still a while off from what I can tell.

Never the less, a mirror option is better than no option so ill give it it go thanks.
 
chancey said:
This is more a mirror than raid,
Click to expand...

Uhm, a 2-disk mirror is a RAID1 array. IOW, it most certainly is a RAID setup. Why would you think it wasn't?

like a replacement on failure. If I have 2 disks i'd like to see twice the read speed
Click to expand...

You will never see twice the read speed from a 2-disk mirror for all workloads. If you try to read two different files simultaneously, and the controller/software is smart enough to read each file off of separate disks, then you get the impression of "twice the read speed". But reading a single large file, it will all come from 1 disk, and be limited to the read speed of that 1 disk.

A 2-disk RAID0 (non-redundant stripeset) would give you twice the read speed for most workloads. But you lose the mirror/redundancy.

... ZFS would be the ideal option but thats still a while off from what I can tell.
Click to expand...

You can't tell. :) ZFS boot has been supported for a year or more now. Even booting off a pool using raidz vdevs. It's not yet part of the standard FreeBSD installer (sysinstall), but there are several how-tos available online (including one here in our How To forum) for installing manually onto a ZFS pool. And the PC-BSD 8 installer can do this (and can even install vanilla FreeBSD).
 
Sort of off-topic, but "is ufs2 the only"
can remind one of...

"gjournal". I set up
gmirror but had trouble with unexpected
results from the command line using it, so
began using gjournal for a few disks. (the
manpage is helpful for the latter).
(New in the works is SUJ, journalling with
softupdates).
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
Not-quite-raid1 is "gjournal".
Click to expand...
Not quite? How about not even close?

Journalling won't save you when a disk dies, RAID1 will.
 
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